The Songs We Grow Into
Some songs arrive before we have the life to understand them.
We may first notice a voice, a melody or one particular change in the music. The words are there, but they have not yet become ours.
Years later, we hear the same song differently. Nothing in the recording has changed. We have.
Before the Words Become Ours
My mother used to play It’s Too Late by Carole King.
As a child, I heard its softness. Only later did I understand the adult truth beneath it: the moment when love may still be present, but something between two people can no longer be repaired simply by wanting it to be different.
I loved the song long before I knew why.
Perhaps that is one reason certain music stays with us. It enters our lives early and waits for experience to reveal what it has been saying all along.
When a Song Becomes a Person
Other songs become attached to one person and one period of our lives so completely that it can be difficult to hear them again.
For many years, I could not listen to Angel by The Style Council.
I did not analyse it or try to overcome it. I simply avoided the song. It carried too much of a love that had ended and too much of the woman I had been within it.
Teardrops by Womack & Womack and Dionne Warwick’s recording of Walk On By belong to that chapter too.
They express heartbreak very differently. Teardrops carries sorrow inside a rhythm that keeps moving. Walk On By does almost the opposite: it turns restraint into heartbreak.
Hearing It Again
When I eventually listened to Angel again, the memory was still there. But it no longer had the same power over me.
The song had not become less important. If anything, I could hear it more clearly.
The difference was that I was no longer standing inside the story.
This is what time can do to music. A song once too painful to hear can become part of our history without pulling us back into it.
We begin to notice other things: the restraint in the voice, the arrangement, the pause before a line.
We hear not only the person we once loved, but also the person we were when we loved them.
The Music That Stays
The songs that remain with us are not necessarily the greatest songs ever recorded.
They are the ones that know something about our lives.
They remember a room, a journey, a face or an earlier version of ourselves with an accuracy that ordinary memory sometimes lacks.
I do not need to explain who these songs were for.
The music holds that part for me.
The recording has remained the same.
I have finally grown into it.
Rooted in Depth. Radiating Light.