Songs for Some People I May Have Been

All those people we used to know ... they're an illusion to me now.

I’ve been thinking about some of the people I may have been. Thinking about what L.P. Hartley wrote about the past being a different country. Thinking, too, about what Derek Walcott wrote in Another Life about living half your life and the rest being memory.

I’ve been wondering about the continuum between past and present that gives us a sense that we have access to those foreign countries and other lives. That’s memory, of course. The electricity of experience as we lived those moments, the layering of experience as we absorbed them.

Music, too, of course. I was always going to say ‘music’, because that’s been the way I’ve threaded the narrative of experience for nearly as long as I can remember. (I can remember many moments pre-music—before music became the way I made sense of the world—but they’re harder to get to.)

Sometimes it feels so vivid, this connection to the past. Other times, it’s forever slipping through your fingers like water. Evaporating on the ground. Or flowing so abundantly you couldn’t even try to capture it.

‘All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now’. Dylan. And the people we used to be: are they an illusion too?

I’m going back for some of them. I’m going to play those ghosts the songs that might bring them home.

A ten-year-old spending pocket money on seven-inch singles at Woolworth’s. Some are destined to be traded with friends at school.

A song for that boy: Madness, ‘One Step Beyond’.

A thirteen-year-old staying at his grandparents’ house. He’s got the twelve-inch single of ‘Purple Rain’ and he keeps playing it over and over. It becomes his world for a while. I wonder, sometimes, whether he ever escaped from the hold of that guitar solo and what it would grow into.

A song for him: Prince, ‘Purple Rain’.

A fourteen-year-old in front of a Binatone tower hifi, manipulating a turntable and cassette decks to create thirty-minute mixes of singles by Depeche Mode, Chaka Khan, Art of Noise, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Torrents of juddery, stuttery, mashed-up syllables: something of a trend at the time (‘n-n-n-n-nineteen’).

A song for that boy: Art of Noise, ‘Close (to the Edit) - Closely Closely (Enough’s Enough) Mix’.

A teenager making maps of dungeons, forts, alien territories and space ports. He fills them with obstacles and traps to test his gaming friend, plotting how to outdo the last masterpiece of mapping. Hours spent in what, many years later, he would come to know as game theory. He cycles to his friend’s house. They play games, listen to music, sometimes eat.

Play Iron Maiden’s ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’ for those gamers. Play the Live After Death version and scream for me, Long Beach.

The same pair striding purposefully across Dartmoor or Exmoor or the Brecon Beacons. They’ll be waking tomorrow to curious sheep outside their tent.

Play them Jethro Tull, ‘Songs from the Wood’.

A teenager picking sweetcorn and courgettes on a Devon farm between finishing school and starting technical college. Much is learned in those weeks and adulthood is beckoning.

A song for him: Roy Harper, ‘One of Those Days in England’. Another: Van Morrison, ‘Summertime in England’.

An increasingly longhaired youth mixing with a more cosmopolitan crowd than he’s ever known, even as he starts to suspect that graphic design may not be for him. Goths with their darkness. The cappuccino crowd with their lightness and conversational ease. Eyeliner here, stonewashed jeans there. Grolsch bottle tops. Coffee. Bleached perms.

A song to pierce the dry ice: All About Eve, ‘She Moves through the Fair’. And, for where that helped take him, play Fairport Convention’s ‘Matty Groves’.

An eighteen-year-old on a three-day bus journey from London to Athens. Not talking much. Watching Europe speed by. Books and a Walkman help. When they reach their destination, he makes more of an effort to mix, seeking company in new surroundings. The older travellers treat him as one of their own to start with, thinking he’s older than he is.

A song for window-staring: Neil Young and Stephen Stills, ‘Long May You Run’.

An eighteen-year-old, excited and incredulous to find that two of the Texan songwriters he’s recently become obsessed with—Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keen—are playing a gig in his hometown of Newton Abbot. He’s never seen anyone of this kind play here. The evening is everything he hopes it will be and, for years after, he’ll continue to be amazed it happened. The Plough & Harrow up above Buckland. Searching for any traces of the event in 2024, he’ll find none. The pub has been demolished and new houses occupy the site. But he has photographs, memories and autographs.

Two songs for that lifelong fan of Texas music: Guy Clark, ‘Like a Coat from the Cold’; Robert Earl Keen, ‘The Road Goes on Forever’.

A young man hearing Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’ being read on The South Bank Show over footage of the Caribbean and falling in love with its cadence. Something is born here, some desire to want to do something with words and sounds, the presence too of an unthought known that has to do with memory and narrative. Around the same time, on a now-forgotten British television programme, Caetano Veloso is featured and something else is set in motion.

Play, or have read by someone who can do justice to its register, ‘The Schooner Flight’. Play Caetano Veloso’s ‘Estrangeiro’.

An eighteen-year-old pulling pizzas from the oven in a restaurant, dreaming of Canada. He walks home to a shared bedsit. Alternating between early and late shifts and with his roommate working in the local zoo, he spends long periods alone. Sitting and thinking. Making plans to be elsewhere. This new independent living will soon evolve to a room in a shared bungalow in East Ogwell. A space for comings and goings, weird encounters, torchlit midnight walks into town and back, a glimpse of what life might be and what he might not want it to be. New old sounds continue to arrive, while time and sense are often distorted. Life’s chaotic. Sometimes it all comes around and sometimes it doesn’t.

Play him ‘Cycles’ by Frank Sinatra, then ‘Heroin’ by the Velvet Underground. Continue with ‘Sunday Morning’ and circle back to Frank.

A nineteen-year-old hauling a backpack from a pickup truck in Macdiarmid, Ontario, then walking into the wooden house that would be his home for the next three months. Handed a guitar and asked if he can play, he croaks out a rendition of Lyle Lovett's 'If I Had a Boat'. A bond is made and he is one of the group.

A song for that bewildered young man: Lyle Lovett, ‘If I Had a Boat’. 

A young man reading the back of a record sleeve that, instead of a tracklist, bears the following message: ‘A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’

A song for that discoverer: Scott Walker, ‘On Your Own Again’.

A twenty-two-year-old in a beige Triumph on his first self-driven road trip, struggling through thick rain and fog on the M5 with Willie Nelson’s Across the Borderline in the tape deck.

One of many songs from that tape that will stay with him for decades: Willie Nelson and Sinéad O'Connor, ‘Don’t Give Up’.

A university student on the sofa in another student’s flat in Coventry getting increasingly lost in the various mixes of ‘Protection’. Didn’t something similar happen with that Red House Painters record last week? Was that another house, another group? It all blurs.

A song for those blissed-out souls: Massive Attack with Tracey Thorn, ‘Protection (The Eno Mix)’.

A vegetarian in his mid-twenties struggling to be understood in South America. From Chile up through Bolivia and Peru, giving in first to fish to have a break from corn and eggs. Chicken after three days on a boat in the Amazon, a diet he continues as he makes his way north to the Caribbean. Reading Neruda, Mistral, Lispector, Walcott. Writing it all down. Taking the risks the young do.

Play him the music that’s going to sustain him in the years to come. Play him Víctor Jara’s ‘Te Recuerdo Amanda’, Violeta Parra’s ‘Gracias a la Vida’ and Silvio Rodríguez’s ‘Unicornio’.

A man in his mid-late twenties, hair increasingly streaked with grey, commuting from a Midlands spa town to a nearby business park. Excel spreadsheets. Accounts receivable and payable. Macros and printouts. Budgets and ledgers. Swipe cards and security. Coffee machines and cubicles. Cigarette breaks and gossip. PowerPoints and precarity.

A song for the commuter: Lucinda Williams, ‘Lake Charles’.

A desperate twenty-eight-year-old trying to get out of Cornwall while thousands of others do the same. He’s driving a red Mazda and all the roads are clogged with drivers heading back after the last total solar eclipse of the millennium. Avoiding the main roads, and many years away from trying any kind of satnav, he stops frequently to check the road atlas and work out alternative routes through the lanes and villages. No luck. The trip to view the eclipse has been a letdown. As Nicholas Witchell reports for the BBC, ‘for most people, the cloud was impenetrable’. It’s not just that. There are other reasons to feel he is ‘under leaden skies’ (Witchell’s words again). He needs to get out of there quickly and this makes the blocked Cornish roads all the more infuriating. He’s only trying to get to the neighbouring county, Devon. It takes nine hours. He plays music. There must have been a lot to choose from—there always was—but what dominates the memory is a self-made compilation of Neal Casal songs, played over and over in search of consolation. In this ‘moment of totality’ (Witchell) he just needs to escape. ‘I was surprised at how emotional the whole thing was as it suddenly got dark’, one eclipse-watcher tells the BBC crew. So many things were ending, but soon there would be new things and life would start again.

If he needs Casal, play him Casal. But maybe not that compilation. Maybe play him ‘Maybe California’ or put the whole of Fade Away Diamond Time on in its original sequence. Remind him that it remains a stone classic that transcends heartbreak. Maybe.

See him wasted on the sidewalk in his jacket and his jeans, wearing yesterday's misfortunes like a smile.

Play him Kris Kristofferson, ‘The Pilgrim, Chapter 33’.

A man at various ages of his life deciding, and reiterating, that Joni Mitchell’s Blue is the album he feels closest to. Not only for its undisputed brilliance but also because of some personal connections: the name of the character in its final track, its release date, its ‘moon in Cancer’.

You know he wants to hear Blue. Maybe play him ‘For Free’ instead. He’ll appreciate it decades later when Lana’s cover becomes a staple on his car stereo.

A man in his twenties learning that it’s not always the obvious ones.

The only song he wants sometimes: Nina Simone, ‘That’s All I Want from You’.

A man entering his fourth decade and finding himself in Lisbon, in love again. Blue skies over azulejos. Calçada polished by shoes and weather. Walking the hills and alleys for hours. Fully carnivorous again. Studying for a postgraduate degree, he immerses himself further in American country and rap. The wider world never stops calling, though: Arabic song, global jazz, post rock, música popular brasileira, fado of course.

Play Mariza’s ‘Ó Gente da Minha Terra’, a song that Amália Rodrigues wrote but didn’t record.

A man living in a room he calls ‘the box’ in a city that’s the furthest north he’s ever been in England. Settling into his thirties, he turns his attention to histories of Portuguese fado, Latin American nueva canción and British punk. On Saturdays he may look out of his window to see the whole city parading up Gallowgate to the stadium.

A song for this distracted scholar: Grandaddy, ‘Now It’s On’.

Same box, new distractions. Computer games one night, Tarkovsky movies the next. This man’s been gifted a baglama and he tries to learn it, getting beautifully lost in drones, microtones and glitches from cheap microphones. The endless river of Magpies flows by below. For several weeks he becomes obsessed with the newly released DVD of Heartworn Highways. He’d managed to videotape it years earlier when it was shown on British television, but new media and the years lived since bring new insights. It becomes the only thing that will comfort him when he’s in a certain mood, usually late at night after having been out.

Any of the songs from that movie would do. Start at the beginning with Guy Clark’s ‘LA Freeway’ playing over the credits.

A man in his thirties on a coach from Newcastle to Newton Abbot, watching the motorway miles pass. Then the reverse journey and more escapist window-gazing.

A song for this long-distance visitor: Laura Cantrell, ‘When the Roses Bloom Again’.

A man in his thirties during the peak of the blogosphere, trying his hand at life writing. Inspired by a song that’s been haunting him for the best part of a decade, he starts a blog called ‘A Passing September’. He can’t quite get it and, like everything, it passes. Just as he has before, though, he’ll keep trying to catch the ephemeral, to do something with memory that does justice to what nostalgia could be if weren’t so often what it is.

A song for him: Iris Dement, ‘My Life’.

An author a year before his fortieth birthday receiving ten copies of his soon-to-be-published book on fado as he lounges in a sunny back garden with his sister and new nephew.

A song brought briefly into the light from its dark resting place: Amália Rodrigues, ‘Lágrima’.

A man approaching forty driving across the North York Moors in a rented car, his partner by his side.

Play one of the songs that soundtracks their journey: Ruth Notman, ‘Heather down the Moor’.

A man of forty attending the launch of his new favourite songwriter’s album in the Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A song like none he’s encountered before: Richard Dawson, ‘Wooden Bag’.

A forty-three-year-old reading Ralph Stanley’s Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times and finding joy in the eighty-three-year-old’s account of being an eight-year-old boy with a ‘hundred-year-old voice’. Finding joy and resonance, too, in a list from John Wright’s Traveling the High Way Home: Ralph Stanley and the World of Traditional Bluegrass Music:

‘A band bus crawling doggedly through the night with no illumination but its parking lights; a blind prematurely aged ex-miner tending a mountain garden on two wooden legs; a small boy running away from an inhuman job at a cotton mill; a puzzled mountaineer encountering pizza for the first time; a farm wife riding an old gray mare to church; a cross-cut sawmill in Virginia; a Kentucky truck mine; a flooding creek in North Carolina; ginseng; chinquapins; fried apple pie …’

A song for that researcher: Ralph Stanley, ‘The Old Church Yard’.

A man of forty-four on a bus from Canberra to Melbourne. He has another favourite songwriter to add to the list.

A song for a window-gazer: Jason Isbell, ‘24 Frames’.

A man of indeterminate age asked to go diving for memories of the 1980s and imagining a decade that he never really lived.

Play The Go-Betweens’ ‘Streets of Your Town’ or anything from the 1978-1990 compilation.

A man of forty-five, brokenhearted by what’s happening to his country. Things are changing again. Soon there will be another leavetaking. Before he heads north to another life, he takes the opportunity to drive the Sussex Downs in a blue Skoda.

A song for that final Sussex summer: Shirley & Dolly Collins, ‘A Leavetaking: Pleasant and Delightful’.

A man of forty-six finding it harder every day.

One new song: Willie Nelson, ‘It Gets Easier’. One older song: Iris DeMent, ‘Easy’s Gettin’ Harder Every Day’. They’re both right.

A forty-seven-year-old university lecturer teaching a class on global pop.

Play them Omar Souleyman’s remix of Björk’s ‘Crystalline’ and talk to them about World Music 2.0.

A forty-nine-year-old university lecturer teaching a class on global pop.

Play them M.I.A.’s ‘Jimmy’ and talk to them about song itineraries and appropriation.

A fifty-year-old university lecturer teaching a class on global pop.

Play them Ibibio Sound Machine, ‘Protection From Evil’ and talk to them about Afrobeat.

A fifty-two-year-old in purple tracksuit trousers and bright blue trainers peddling away on a fitness bike in his sitting room, listening to 1989 (Taylor’s Version) for motivation and monitoring activity on a newly acquired Fitbit.

A song for this sweaty soul: Taylor Swift, ‘Out of the Woods (Taylor’s Version)’.

A middle-aged man doing a lot of remembering even as new obsessions take hold.

A song for him: Nanci Griffith, ‘October Reasons’.