6 More Songs Filled with Good Memories

The Jackson Five, The Alan Parsons Project, Boston, and more...

Editor’s Note: Check out the ongoing discussions about music at GOTD and associate editor Mike Kilgore’s daily music series:

1. What's in your wallet... er... music library?

2. Who Is Generation X's Greatest Black Musician? Here's My Vote

3. Generation X's Greatest Black Musician? Rihanna, In My Humble Opinion.

4. Rihanna is an Xer-Leaning Millennial! Try Again, Mike!

5. I Didn't Do My Due Diligence, or How I Have to Pick a Favorite Black Gen X Musician For Real This Time.

6. Why Rap & Country Are So Challenging and Why I Much Prefer Tupac Shakur to Will Smith

7. Music. The GotD Frontier

8. As a Gen-Xer, the 1980s is My Favorite Musical Decade

9. These 2 Hypnotic Sitar Albums Saved Me Last Night as the PTSD Demons Struck Back

10. The Thousand Year Charm Offensive of Frank Zappa

Check out “Mike’s Music Morning,” born from these debates.

1. The Inaugural "Mike's Music Morning" post

2. How Many Licks Does it Take to Get to the Center of My Music Collection?

3. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

4. What music evokes an emotional response for you? What song really twangs your heartstrangs?

5. What Reminds You of Mardi Gras? For Me, it's Always Music and Food

6. Would you like a little slink with your Wednesday?

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Having fun with the musical theme from

Mike Kilgore

, I thought I’d follow up with more of my song-memory combinations. As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the fun aspects of music for me is the memories that often get associated with particular songs. When the song is played, I am often transported back in time by the memory. These are often joyful, pleasant sensations that simply add to my enjoyment of the song.

Here are a few more examples that bring me back to good times:

1. The Jackson Five – “ABC”

This memory goes back to a Saturday morning the early 1970s in Lakeside Park, Kentucky. We had a little record player in the basement. My mom had bought a cereal box with a record that you had to cut off of the box, which she did for me. I happily listened to it over and over.

2. The Alan Parsons Project – “Games People Play”

When I hear this song, I am harkened back to 1982. The feeling is one of stomach butterflies excitement of riding a Metro train home from school on a Friday afternoon. I have a newly purchased Sony Walkman-style headset (mine was a Toshiba). “Games People Play” was being played on DC/101 a lot in those days, but a memory of the Metro train pulling into the Brookland-CUA station for a stop is permanently associated with this song. Just three more stops and I would be in Silver Spring and home!

3. Boston – “Foreplay/Long Time”

I worked for Jerry’s Sub Shop in downtown Silver Spring in 1983, cooking pizzas, making subs, and washing dishes, cleaning the bathrooms, you name it. I often found it a grueling working evenings, especially with school the next day. This particular night was a Friday night, and the owners’ son was in charge that night. Instead of the ordinary painfully bad taped music they played over the restaurant’s loud system, the son had brought his expensive boombox and played Boston’s first two albums for us as we cleaned and folded pizza boxes. For some reason, “Foreplay/Long Time” is the song only associated in my mind with this good time.

4. Level 42 – “Something About You”

This song was a top 10 hit in the US in 1985. When I hear this song, I’m transported back to a Saturday morning when I worked in the Computer Operations department of the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). As a student worker, I worked the day shift every Saturday and Sunday (plus a couple of hours on the evening shift on two weekdays). One of the operators had set up a fairly decent stereo system in the systems console area, and every Saturday, my workmates would play the weekly top 10 songs show. I liked this song for sure, but I have no idea why I associate it with this memory from 1985. I certainly heard lots of other songs I liked back then, but for whatever reason, it’s this song and no others.

5. The Fixx – “Red Skies”

This song reminds me of May 1985. As above, I have this memory of being at work at UMCP and someone had brought in a CD of the Fixx’s album, Shuttered Room, to play on a stereo set up on a closet in the computer room. That day I was, apparently, filled with the wanderlust of Spring, wanting to take up all stakes and drive to Ocean City. The water would be incredibly cold to swim in, I thought, but oh, to be at the beach in the sun. What fun it would be! I didn’t actually go to the beach at that time, but the intense desire to go was imprinted on my experience of this song. Seems odd when I think about it.

6. Whitney Houston – “How Will I Know?”

This song is permanently fixed with “Beach Week” 1986 for me. In Maryland, graduating high school classes all celebrated with a week-long trip to Ocean City, Maryland. I had already had my “Beach Week” two years before—this years’ was my brother Steve’s. I took full advantage and visited Steve and his pals for an evening of that week. Upon my arrival, they were watching MTV on cable television and Whitney Houston’s song was playing. She looked darn cute with a large bow in her hair.

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These are but a few more of the sometimes vivid memories that are stimulated by songs when I hear them. Again, I’d love to hear about your own associations with songs.