Whenever I hear Peter Cetera belt out “Waiting for the break of day” in the song “25 or 6 to 4,” I’m carried back to the brick house on Hunting Creek Road in Montgomery, Alabama, where I lived as a child. I’m four years old. I’m on the rust-colored shag carpet and can smell the drywall and new paint in our den that had doubled in size from its recent renovation. I see my dad hanging his new Bose 901 speakers and setting up his sound system, including a Philips turntable. My Barbie dolls are not far from my reach, and I’d bet I ate a bowl of Frosted Flakes for breakfast. That song is my earliest music memory. 

Music helps us inhabit time in ways that open us up to mystery, nuance, and new perspectives. Recent measurements of brain activity depict an experience most of us have had: being transported back in time by a song. Armed with those images, scientists explain that the medial prefrontal cortex, which is located right behind the eyes, collects music, memory, and emotion and braids them together as we listen and respond to songs from long ago. While we listen to old, familiar songs, our past combines with the present and we are in two places at the same time.

Chicago IX: Chicago’s Greatest Hits was released on November 10, 1975, when I was seven months old, and it became one of my dad’s favorites. He played it for years. The lyrics and melodies are embedded in my mind, in my body. They made a home in me the way small animals burrow into the ground and form a place to dwell.

I was twelve years old when 10,000 Maniacs’s In My Tribe was released in 1987. I bought it with money I earned from babysitting Emma Jones. It was the first cassette tape I discovered on my own, without anyone’s recommendation, and I preferred it to the Top 40 hits my friends loved. I still listen to this album, as a married mom of two kids who are just a couple years older than I was when I first discovered Natalie Merchant’s music. I know every word, every bridge, and I sing along to the whole album from Merchant’s vocal run in the intro of “What’s the Matter Here?” to her closing ah la las of “Verdi Cries.”

In My Tribe takes me back to my middle school bedroom with the pink and white striped wallpaper and stacks of books, papers, and assignments scattered about the floor. When I’d stay up late on the phone with George or Kellie or Julie, Merchant’s voice became the soundtrack for our gossip, dramas, and philosophical explorations. 

And then to my college dorm room, when the lyrics about politics, justice, life, and love became more meaningful. My suitemate, Anna, and I would sprawl on the uncomfortable couches in the common area, where we had conversations about the racial tension on campus, the hypocrisy of people who claimed to be Christians, and why certain books and movies made us feel known.

And then to the passenger seat of the tidy black Camry my husband drove during our dating. The sunroof is open and we’re singing along to “Like the Weather” and “Don’t Talk” while holding hands on our way to dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant, the one with the perfect sesame chicken.

Throughout my teens and into early adulthood, I viewed Merchant as a sort of long-distance older sister, and her songs were her letters to me. Her words spoke into my adolescent angst and aloneness, comforting me. Merchant’s music fulfilled my desire for more substance, substance that was absent from many of my relationships.

This album transports me back to the people I love and have loved, as well as into my past selves, the past Charlottes who have formed who I am now. 

During my second major manic episode in June 2011, I returned to familiar music to escape my paranoia and hallucinations. The music replaced my disjointed and fantastical thoughts and gave me something real to hang on to. Listening to music I knew and loved pulled me into a past version of myself that was still a part of me, a version of myself that was less alone, less isolated. It reminded me I had been healthy once and would be healthy again. Music gave me hope.

*****

Since music has helped me belong to myself and others throughout my childhood, teens, and adulthood, I hope the same will be true for my children. My husband and I encourage them to listen to and appreciate various genres of music. If a well-known or iconic song comes on the radio when we’re all in the car together, I do a pop quiz to see if they know the artist. I believe it’s important for them to know who has come before them and influenced their favorite artists. Bob Dylan. Janis Joplin. Bob Marley. Fleetwood Mac. LL Cool J. We often listen to music together in our living room. One family memory I cherish still, from many years ago: On a spring afternoon, a severe thunderstorm knocked out the power at our home in Alabama for several hours. As the sun set, my two kids, husband, and I lit candles in the family room. We turned on The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album). All of us sat through the entire ninety-three minutes and twenty-six seconds while the album played—listening, singing together, my children at times perplexed. The music we shared that night bound us together. It became something bigger, something communal, something lasting.

[Adapted from The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other by Charlotte Donlon. Copyright © 2020 Broadleaf Books. Used by permission.]

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