by Joe Broadmeadow
Music does not ask permission. Four bars come out of a car radio or drift down from a supermarket ceiling, and suddenly you are somewhere else, some other year, standing in a room that no longer exists. No other art form works this fast.
A photograph shows you the past from the outside. A song puts you back inside it.
There is a physical reason for that. Music binds itself to autobiographical memory in a way that language alone does not. Neurologists have documented patients in the late stages of dementia, people who can no longer reliably name their own children, who will sing every word of a song they learned at seventeen. The melody outlasts nearly everything around it. Whatever the brain uses to file music, it files it deep, below the reach of most damage.
I have had reason to think about memory more carefully than most people, because of how I spent twenty years of my life. Police work leaves you with an archive you never asked for and cannot delete. You do not get to choose what stays. The things I would happily surrender are the ones that come back in the sharpest detail: a kitchen, a stairwell, the particular quality of light in a hallway at four in the morning.
Memory is not a filing cabinet you control. It is closer to a room where the furniture rearranges itself while you sleep, and where the worst thing in it is always somehow nearest the door.
Which is why one song has stayed with me the way it has.
Be someone worth remembering. It is the closest one can come to immortality.
Joe Broadmeadow
Jane Olivor recorded “You” in 1977, on Chasing Rainbows. She was being compared to Streisand and Piaf then, at the front end of a career that fame and grief would later interrupt for a decade. The song is small. It does not build to anything. It is no bigger than a room with one person in it.
I heard the song on an AM radio station (my car didn’t have FM) and missed the name of the artist. Rhode Island then offered up one of the perks of living in the smallest state: I went to high school with the DJ. When next I saw him, I asked the title of the song and thus began a lifetime association with Ms. Olivor’s music and the song “You” in particular.
This song contains a line that has done more work in my head than most of the books I have read or things I have experienced. More than Shakespeare, Blake, Vonnegut, or Chaucer. More, I must admit, than the memories of Charlie Brown’s Christmas.
The singer takes the whole cluttered inventory of a life, everything a person accumulates and carries and eventually loses, and she sorts it. Almost none of it survives the sorting. Then she turns to the one person still standing at the end and tells them plainly:
“You are one of the few things worth remembering…”
The modesty of that is what makes it land.
A love song that says you are everything is making a claim no adult believes, including the person making it. It is weather. It passes. But a line that says I went through all of it, and most of it went into the bin, and you were still there is not weather. It is a verdict. It has the sound of someone doing arithmetic rather than someone in the grip of a feeling. It is the difference between being told you are loved and being told you are counted.
Anyone who has lived long enough to lose things understands the accounting. You reach a certain age, and you realize how little of your own life you actually retained. Whole years have gone smooth. Jobs, houses, arguments that felt like the end of the world at the time—all of it sanded down to nothing. What is left is a handful of faces and maybe a dozen afternoons. That is the real inheritance. Not the résumé. The short list.
And here is the thing about a song built around a single unnamed you: the blank is the point. Olivor is not singing about anyone I know. She is singing about someone I know very well, because I am the one filling in the name, and so is every other person who has ever sat still while that track played. The song hands you an empty space and lets you find out, without warning, whose face arrives in it. Sometimes you learn something about yourself in the half second before you can stop it.
I hiked the Appalachian Trail with songs looping in my head for hours at a stretch, the way they do when there is nothing else out there and your mind starts reaching for whatever it has stored. You discover fairly quickly what your own head considers worth playing on repeat, and it is never what you would have predicted. Nobody chooses their soundtrack. It gets installed, mostly before you turn twenty-five, and then it runs for the rest of your life without asking.
My grandsons are building their archives right now. Levi and Wyatt hear music the way children do, without any idea that some of it is being welded into them permanently, that forty years from now a few bars will drop one of them straight back into a kitchen in Rhode Island with people in it who are gone. You cannot tell them which songs will do this. You cannot pick for them. You can only be present in enough rooms while the music is playing.
Which brings me back to Olivor’s line and to the question underneath it, which is not really a question about music at all.
We spend a great deal of energy deciding what is worth remembering. Very little on the other side of it.
Be someone worth remembering. It is the closest one can come to immortality.
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