Intertwined

I was thinking about music and how it’s bound up with emotion and people.

I read somewhere that music is keyed into our hormones. This means that we remember and love the music that we hear at the times of our lives when we have a lot of hormones surging through our bodies.

Neuroscience researcher Dr. Valorie Niloufar Salimpoor (great name, huh!) says that we love music because listening to it releases dopamine – the same brain chemical associated with food, drugs, and sex. Sounds about right to me.

Your average teenager has loads of surging hormones and listens to lots of music.

I reckon that’s why, when we ‘grow up’, we like to listen to music that we heard as teenagers and why any other music just doesn’t hit the spot. It kind of seems to us that they don’t make good songs anymore – even though, actually, that’s incorrect.

And that set me off thinking about things that never were and never will be.

Those songs I listened to, when I was of a certain age, have become intertwined with people and emotions. There’s an album mixed up with my first girlfriend, one mixed up with my breakup with another girl, one that’s mixed up with this girl that lived downstairs from me … and it goes on.

It’s a mixed up, messed up, co-dependant world I live in.

But what do you reckon – did good music really die as soon as you left your teen years behind? And if you haven’t exited that time yet – are you sure that this is the most important time in the whole of musical history?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address …