![]() Before the chagrin of wisdom sets in, there is the fuel of youth and beauty, the notion that life is fair, things will last and the way of life our grandparents believed in was worth cherishing. Still, there’s something wonderful about innocence, about not knowing and dreaming, believing in impossible things. Many a high-school prom was soundtracked by the song with the notion of celebration-missing the eschewing of what was. Green Day’s uncharacteristically acoustic guitar-driven “Good Riddance (The Time of Your Life)” offers an unflinching shuddering off of what is now behind. If Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” with its farfisa organ trills and churning bass part, seems like a bit of carnival cotton candy, listen to the lyrics of the folks trapped in their past, high-school heroes whose lives won’t ever get any better. Sometimes, those songs-often delivered in merciful soft focus, Vaseline slathered on the lens for diffusion-even tell the harsh truth about looking back. The music that “got us through,” “helped us cope” or truly celebrated how freaking awesome we were before life’s tentacles of responsibility ensnared us.īeyond returning to those records that mattered, or the concert tours designed to dredge our inner 15-year-olds shrieking at maximum lung capacity, nostalgia offers a far more narcotic reality: the fodder for songs. Many of us, needing solace or balm, reach for the records of our youth. It’s co-opted into an idealization of what was-without the tempering of the hurt, the ache, the suck that often embedded the moments in our psyche. ![]() Nostalgia by nature is a sticky, treacly thing. Songs and the past: there’s nothing quite so intoxicating. ![]() Yet somehow the urgency and viscous element of the moment remain even in the rearview mirror. Bob Seger captured the strain of want and release in the heartland from a vantage point many years later. Ain’t it funny how when you just ain’t got as much loseĪ hollow acoustic guitar, a slightly dusty male voice aged by the road and experience, a loping groove and a lyric that-like a Japanese ink drawing-takes a few lines and paints a novel. ![]()
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