pointless nostalgic

As I wrote before, I bought a few Jamie Cullum CD’s after seeing him live in DC earlier this month. Below are the liner notes (which I love) from his album “Pointless Nostalgic” (which I ALSO love):

“I once met a man who, when asked why he never took photographs of his kids, simply tapped the side of his head and said “it’s all in here.” I admired that greatly, because I simply don’t have enough trust in my memory. I need reminders, markers that point the brain in the right direction amongst the most complex of mazes.

Why is it so hard to let go of that piece of paper scrawled on by someone once loved? These pointless artifacts are the proof of a moment lost in time, but they can never tell the full story.

Nostalgia takes hold, dishing out its rose-colored glasses to watch the show that is the past as you remember it. This is the show I love to watch, pointlessly, again and again.

Music has a far greater potency- it can make time more immediate whilst simultaneously placing you effortlessly back to a moment in your childhood, a particular summer or just last week. Song become a blueprint for your own personal mind map, who cares that “It Ain’t Necessarily So” was written in 1935, it has got all my own baggage attached to it now-not just the many and varied interpretations of it. There is always room for reinterpretation of a song because every radically different human being has his or her collective and emerging lifetime to impress upon it.

Music takes hold, and it is far more dangerous than nostalgia. Good times, bad times, and boring times can be returned to with startling clarity; but it is the moment that becomes most important, where life is meant to be, for there can be no lie in a sweet melody or an evil groove.

The perfect cure for my pointless nostalgia.”

This is true to my life. I can’t tell you how music takes me back to moments, feelings and smells in a way nothing else does.

Every time I listen to my Kelly Clarkson CD I remember the moment I slipped in into my CD player in India. It was a time when I was desperate to feel connected to my American culture and longed to escape to being my silly American self. I can smell the room I was sitting in the moment I first heard it, and remember how important it was for me to fall into a different world for an afternoon.

Its true of one of my Switchfoot CD’s too. Their album “Nothing is Sound” came out while I was living in Madison, and I had it in my stereo that fall and listened to it everywhere I went. Every time I hear that music I remember driving to and from coffeehouses late at night to study for the GRE’s, when the winter was just beginning and wisps of snow were falling. I remember the feelings of frustration and fear that were associated with those drives, me praying for God’s grace on my test and my future; that I would be able to achieve the dreams I held and that my life wouldn’t go to waste.

Even Jamie Cullum’s music reminds me of working at the coffee shop. The owner loved jazz and had his CD’s, and I would listen to them over and over while I worked, closed and cleaned the place. His song “Twentysomething” was particularly appropriate; it was all about figuring out what to do with your life after college and aligning what you learned in classes with what is really valuable in the world.

Anyway, I loved these notes and thought I should share.