We’ve all said it (or indeed screamed it) when a song from our past comes on: “What a throwback!”
Music soundtracks our lives. It becomes ingrained in our memory alongside our biggest milestones, from weddings to funerals, summer lovin‘ to heartbreak.
It can make or break a night (nothing worse than a bad DJ) and it signals the start of the festive season in shopping centres. While we can’t all be in a musical – bursting into song in the street to tell our story – music is with us almost everywhere we go: the supermarket, the car, and thanks to every device since the Walkman, on every run and commute if we choose.
Music also brings us together. Italians united in tune from their balconies in the early days of the pandemic and Ukrainians sung in solidarity while sheltering in metro stations during recent Russian missile strikes on Kyiv. You only have to look at the outpouring of grief when musicians like David Bowie die to recognise the extent that music affects and unites us.
The days of CDs in the car and swapping mixtapes on first dates might be fading, but hearing the first bars of a song can bring memories into sharp focus.
Listening to Lorde reminds me of my dorm room at university – in an instant it takes me back to college accommodation where fire alarms were set off by burning toast in the middle of the night and I had to resort to music to fall asleep again.
As I studied Spanish in my final years of school and prepared for a stint as an au pair in Madrid, my taste for Spanish music coincided with getting my driving licence. Memories of trips to cheap petrol stations out of town feel almost synonymous with Latin pop.
Perhaps the best example of how music connects us is how it binds generations, transporting parents and grandparents back to their own familiar sounds.
Played on repeat, Paul Simon and Van Morrison are my childhood. Never mind that some lyrics may not have made any sense to an eight-year-old, I knew them all. And with music our parents loved in their youth comes stories about how loud an Elton John record played in a 1970s share house was (so loud that the mantelpiece shook) or how close you could get to a band you saw live (so close you could see the beads of sweat).
My once love-hate relationship with melancholy music saw me refuse to listen to the likes of Keith Jarrett and Leonard Cohen because their music was too sad. You can’t tell me you don’t feel melancholy upon hearing the opening bars of Hallelujah.
In time, it becomes your turn to find and share your own taste.
When iTunes entered the fray in the 2000s, I offered up pocket money donations in exchange for the latest singles I wanted to add to the family library. Friends and I burned discs of favourite songs for each other, and so I introduced our house to Jason Mraz and Lady Gaga.
But as music defines us in all sorts of ways, we should also define it.
Who did you listen to in the depths of lockdown and why did it make you forget about Covid case numbers ticking up?
Today, it might mean something new or still make your nose prickle the way it does when emotion hits you in the guts. What song did you listen to on the way to your school netball games that made you feel invincible? Today, such a pump-up could drive you to ask for a promotion.
I may tense at the age-old conversation starter: “What kind of music do you listen to?” but maybe it’s time the answer spans every stage of our life. Trawling through old albums, I rediscovered a CD from the reality TV show So You Think You Can Dance, full of pop songs from 2009 that I would have paid good money for back then. It’s the first time I’ve thought about Ke$ha in over a decade. And truly, what a throwback.
• Maddie Thomas is editorial assistant at Guardian Australia
