The Songs I’ve Assigned to People

I was driving along when I decided to put Ben Howard on.

Almost immediately, I wasn’t in the car anymore.

I was in Plymouth.

I was travelling to meet Karen.

At that point, Karen was essentially a brand-new friend. We had met on a training course where we had spent ten days learning to become Sexological Bodyworkers together, but even saying we’d spent ten days together makes us sound closer than we actually were.

We weren’t roommates.

We didn’t lodge together.

We hadn’t spent evenings staying up late talking or mornings making cups of tea in the same kitchen.

We had simply met.

And yet somehow, not very long afterwards, I was travelling across the country to see her.

Since then we have had some fabulous adventures together. We live at opposite ends of the country, so our friendship has always existed in these concentrated little pockets of time — journeys, visits, experiences, stories.

But this isn’t really a story about those.

It’s about the fact that somewhere along the way, I seem to have assigned Karen an entire Ben Howard album.

Every song came on and made me think of her.

Not just one.

The whole bloody thing.

And while I was driving, I had this overwhelming urge to phone her and say:

Put Ben Howard on.

I wanted her to know I was thinking about her.

But I also wanted to tell her something slightly stranger.

I have apparently given you this album.

It belongs to you now.

Not literally, obviously.

But in whatever filing system my brain uses for music and memory, Ben Howard has been placed firmly inside a folder marked Karen.

And then my brain did what my brain often does.

It wandered off.

Because Karen isn’t the only person I have done this to.

There are people scattered throughout my life who have songs attached to them so firmly that nobody else could ever really have them.

Michael Gibb, one of my high-school boyfriends, has two.

Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) — the one that begins with another turning point and a fork stuck in the road.

And Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer.

Those songs are Michael.

They have been for years.

Someone else could play them at their wedding, put them on a playlist or tell me they are their favourite songs in the world, and somewhere inside my head I would still think:

Michael.

My husband Ste has 7 Days by Craig David.

That one makes complete sense to us.

When we met, everything happened quickly. We saw each other every day. Each day the relationship seemed to move forward another little step, and eventually we realised the song sounded remarkably like our own beginning.

So we claimed it.

Then there is The Key, the Secret.

For years, whenever we were leaving the house, I would say:

“I’ve got the key.”

And Ste would answer:

“I’ve got the secret.”

Just a ridiculous little exchange that became ours.

And so that song became ours too.

Emily will forever be Elbow.

More specifically, she will forever be One Day Like This.

“Throw those curtains wide.”

That song is Emily to me.

There are probably stories attached to why, but sometimes the explanation matters less than the certainty of the association.

You hear the opening and there they are.

Somebody you love, contained in a song.

But then I realised it isn’t only people.

There are places I have assigned music to as well.

There is a road that runs between Carnforth and Silverdale, and that road belongs entirely to the Lighthouse Family.

Not one particular song.

All of it.

The albums.

The sound.

That whole warm, unmistakable Lighthouse Family feeling.

For years I travelled up and down those roads with my family or my cousins, and that music would be playing.

So now the road and the music are inseparable.

I can’t think of that stretch of road without hearing the Lighthouse Family.

And I can’t hear the Lighthouse Family without seeing that road.

The bends.

The landscape.

That particular part of the world.

It’s as though music becomes stitched into geography.

A road can hold an album.

A town can hold a song.

A journey can keep a person.

And sometimes it isn’t even the lyrics.

That might be the strangest part.

A song doesn’t necessarily remind me of somebody because the words describe them.

Sometimes the song was simply playing at the right moment.

In a car.

In a bedroom.

At a party.

On a journey.

During a particular summer.

And somehow the brain welds the two things together.

Person.

Place.

Song.

Memory.

Finished.

Years later, the opening few notes are enough.

You can be forty-two years old driving through Lancashire and suddenly you are seventeen.

Or twenty-one.

Or thirty.

You are standing somewhere you haven’t stood for decades beside somebody you haven’t thought about for months.

Music seems to have access to rooms in our memory that ordinary thought cannot reach.

I can deliberately try to remember a particular year of my life and struggle.

Play me the right song and suddenly I can remember the weather.

The clothes I wore.

The road I was driving down.

The feeling in my stomach.

The person sitting beside me.

Whole sections of life appear.

And apparently, without consciously deciding to, I have been making a soundtrack to my relationships and my places for years.

Which made me wonder whether everybody does this.

Do we all quietly assign music to one another?

Do we assign it to roads and houses and holidays too?

Is there somebody somewhere who hears a song and thinks of me?

Perhaps there is a song I have never even considered significant that belongs completely to me inside somebody else’s head.

Maybe an old friend hears the first few seconds of something and suddenly remembers a night we once spent laughing.

Maybe somebody I haven’t seen for twenty years still hears a particular song and thinks:

Fran.

Maybe my children will have songs that become me one day.

That thought feels enormous.

Because there are so many versions of ourselves walking around inside other people’s memories that we will never get to meet.

And perhaps there are soundtracks to those versions too.

Songs we never chose.

Albums we didn’t know belonged to us.

Roads we didn’t realise had kept us.

Little pieces of music that have somehow become the place where somebody stores a person, a place, a whole piece of their life.

And somewhere inside my own strange mental record collection, Karen has an entire Ben Howard album waiting for her.

Emily has Elbow.

Michael has Green Day and Sixpence None the Richer.

Ste has Craig David and a secret.

And a road between Carnforth and Silverdale will always belong to the Lighthouse Family.

I don’t remember consciously assigning any of them.

But apparently, I did.