“I had to turn the radio off.” Lori’s voice was shaky when she called. “They were playing, ‘Home,’ and I’m still not ready to hear it.”
That’s because the Chris Tomlin song, “Home,” was one we had chosen for Harrison’s memorial service, after our son’s untimely death, now almost a year ago.
Certain songs can bring back feelings so real and vivid that you can’t shake them.
Just several weeks earlier, I had walked back into the house after leaving to teach a Sunday night Bible study. I had barely gotten out of the driveway when I turned around.
“What’s wrong, you’ve got tears in your eyes?” Lori asked.
“I just had to come back for a hug.”
I, too, had just heard “Home.”
Of course, music evokes pleasant feelings, too, and that’s why most of us choose to listen to what we like.
Studies have shown that listening to music creates positive associations in our mind.
Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, studies the connections between music and our deepest memories. The upper and pre-frontal cortex area of the brain creates links between our senses and stimuli, in this case, music, which are then processed and stored in our long-term and short-term memory. Research has also made a connection between music and our implicit memory, that is, the subconscious mind. Data in your brain is retrieved in an involuntary way, so that you can be driving along, like Lori and I were, hear a song, and be overcome by a variety of emotions. (“How music affects your memory,” Brian Clark, musicthinktank.com)
Our subconscious and conscious minds are both active as we listen to music.
One song can splash wave upon wave of memories on us.
I can hear the Kenny Loggins 1984 hit, “This is It,” and suddenly, I’m sitting at my kitchen chair in a two-room, rental house in Fort Worth, Texas, studying for an exam in graduate school. I was wanting to quit, but Kenny’s song fired me up, spurring me on, and so, putting on another pot of coffee, I powered on through the night. I can listen to that song today when I’m flagging and, remembering that time back then when I was tempted to hoist a white flag, I instead, press on.
Or, I can hear the 1972 song by King Harvest, “Dancing in the Moonlight,” and immediately be thrown back to my sophomore year in high school, to an exact moment when I had gotten back late from my high school wrestling match, so it must have been in January or February. I had ridden back with my teammates, Jeff Davis and Mike Johnson, and as I got out of Jeff’s warm car, the freezing cold bit me as I looked up to that moonlit sky, shining as it was with stars, making it seem like all promises of heaven were possible. To this day, I can hear that song in the heat of summer, and that frigid, Oklahoma night sky, star-studded with dreams, will re-energize me down to my bones.
I like to choose my music, as much as possible.
Perhaps King Saul should have been more proactive in listening to music. At least for a time, he had David play the harp, and for a while, it seemed to calm Saul’s tormented soul, but not for long.
But, then, David, too, would suffer, like you and me, from life’s tragedies, some by his own doing and some not, like you and me.
But unlike Saul, David let the Lord put a “new song,” in his mouth. (Psalm 40:3)
And so can you, and so can I.