iPod Time Travel

Recently, I dusted off a number of CD’s that I hadn’t listened to for an extended period, and added them to my iPod playlists. I was amazed at how quickly a particular song transported me in time back to when I either first heard the track or had it in heavy rotation. It’s my version of Rob Gordon’s (High Fidelity) arrangement of albums by the experiences of his life. Here are just a few of those moments for me.

Miles Davis’ All Blues transports me to Highway 132 in Sanpete County, at about midnight, going 75 mph with the brights on, driving home from Karla’s place the autumn before we got married.

Black and White Town by Doves puts me on a regional jet, sitting on a runway in Spokane at 10:00pm, waiting 45 minutes after touchdown to get to the gate (how hard is it to get a gate open, for crying out loud.) This was followed by a 4-hour drive to Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana, in heavy fog.

Rainbow’s End by Modern English transports me back to the summer before my freshman year of high school, when I set up a computer bulletin board system (BBS) in my bedroom and discovered that I was not, in fact, the only kid in Provo who enjoyed working with computers.

Yours by Sara Gazarek: Karla and I were sitting in a movie theater waiting for the film to start. For once, they weren’t playing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s greatest hits to accompany the ads, but this song instead. We went home and bought the album.

Queensryche’s Silent Lucidity: Closing the computer lab at 10pm on a Friday night in 1998, and setting up every station to play Starcraft in a massive free-for-all game with the other sysadmins. (No, at the time, I didn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night. Thanks for asking.)

Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac sends me to the summer I worked for a medical device company in the period between my missionary service and my return to college. I drove a Dodge Colt with no air conditioning, but I did manage to scrape enough together to put a CD player in. At the time I thought a 30-minute commute was the most horrible thing imaginable. Oh, the innocence…

New Order: Waiting for the Sirens’ Call: June 2005, sitting in a bus, crossing the Austria-Germany border and missing my wife. I still want to take her to Vienna someday.

Suedehead by Morrissey transports me to the University of Utah Huntsman Center, where a good friend of mine in high school was so excited to see Morrissey in concert that he paid for tickets for me and my brother so he didn’t have to go alone.

U2’s Beautiful Day was on the radio the morning I got the offer for what I thought was my dream job, making a ton of money and living large off expense accounts. (I was laid off eight months later when the dot-com bubble collapsed.)

Another U2 track, The Electric Co., is off the very first CD I bought (the album was Boy), back in 1987, at Crandall Audio on 800 North in Orem. Since it was the only CD I owned, it got rather heavy rotation.