It shouldn’t surprise me, but it always does: some songs end up “fixed” to a place in my personal history, the record equivalent of Proust’s madeline, a cue that sends me somewhere back in my personal geography. Together, I think of these fixed songs as a personal “song atlas.”
“Sun” by The Hotelier
I hear “Sun” and think of my honeymoon. One day, during our week-long sojourn on Maui, my wife and I woke up at two in the morning to drive up to the summit of Haleakalā to watch the sunrise. We listened to The Hotelier’s album Goodness and laughed hysterically at the relevance of the track “Sun.”
“Cast No Shadow” by Oasis
I listened to this Oasis song—from the second half of their (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?—one day before junior varsity baseball practice in my freshman year of boarding school. I flash back to that cramped room every time I hear it.
“The Holdout / Speed Breaker” by Ben Sollee
Not a well-known song, but it’s made a few of my folk playlists over the years, so I hear it every once in a while. Without fail, I think of August 2017, living in Manhattan and working at an office right on Bryant Park. It was raining, so I walked the long tunnel over from the subway stop at the corner of 42nd and 6th before dashing across the street in the rain, this song thrumming in my ears.
I was excited this past weekend to hear an entry in someone else’s song atlas:
Every time I hear Appetite for Destruction, I think of London.
Now, I don’t have any warm, fuzzy feelings about Guns N’ Roses, but I learned that my father-in-law does. In London for a months-long stint of work, he listened to a track from Appetite for Destruction, usually “Sweet Child O’ Mine” or “Paradise City,” on his brief walk from the hotel to the office.
Now, he hears a track from that album, and those London mornings come back to him—tied to the satisfaction of a successful work assignment that his colleagues considered impossible.
Taylor Coe 