Music has probably accompanied human beings for as long as we have been human.
At some point, somebody must have discovered that striking one piece of wood against another produced a rhythm. Perhaps the first musical performance consisted of two stones, a hollow tree trunk and a few enthusiastic grunts. The audience may have demanded an encore. We have no way of knowing.
What we do know is that every generation has found its own sound.
Music has been used for celebration, mourning, worship, protest, seduction, work and war. Sometimes the words matter most. Sometimes no words are needed. A melody can say something that a carefully constructed sentence cannot—and occasionally says it before we have understood it ourselves.
For my generation, the arrival of rock music was not simply a change in entertainment. It was part of a wider rebellion. The music, the clothes, the hair and the lyrics all challenged the world our parents had built.
We were not merely listening.
We were declaring who we were—or at least who we hoped to become.
We Never Hear Exactly the Same Song
Musical taste is deeply personal.
Thousands of people may gather in one place to hear the same performer, yet they are not necessarily hearing the same thing. One person is caught by the rhythm, another by the words and a third by the memory of somebody who is no longer there.
This is why it can be surprisingly difficult to play a favourite song for a friend.
“Listen to this part,” we say, waiting for the moment that has always moved us.
The friend listens politely.
We expect revelation.
He hears a guitar solo.
The problem is not that he has failed to understand the music. He simply did not live the life that became attached to it.
As the years pass, certain songs stop being only songs. They hold places, faces, losses, victories, first loves and roads we travelled long ago. The opening notes can take us back before we have had time to resist.
Some of those memories can be shared. Others belong entirely to us. We may describe what happened, where we were and who was there, but we cannot transfer the experience itself.
The other person can hear the same recording.
He cannot hear our life inside it.
A Silent New Year in Sweden
New Year’s Eve in the emergency department in Reykjavík could resemble a small war.
The sky flashed with fireworks. Alcohol flowed freely. People fell, fought, burned themselves and occasionally managed all three. Nobody working that night expected peace and quiet.
During my first year of specialist training in Sweden, the holiday shifts had to be divided among the doctors. One could work Christmas or New Year. I was allocated the days around New Year, so I flew home to Iceland with my family for Christmas and then returned alone to Sweden before the end of the year.
I prepared for a demanding night.
Almost nothing happened.
A handful of patients arrived with problems so minor that I felt they might nearly have been managed by telephone. At midnight, I went onto the hospital roof. There was not a single firework in the sky.
The following morning, I cycled home beneath a clear winter sky. Frost covered the trees. It was a beautiful morning.
But the quiet New Year had left me feeling alone and slightly cheated.
When I reached home, I remembered that I had visited the duty-free shop on my journey. More importantly, I had my records and my record player.
I sat on the floor, with records scattered all around me, choosing one and then another.
As the music played, my own memories returned.
People, places and moments came back with the songs. I could not have shared those memories fully with anyone, even if somebody had been sitting beside me. They belonged to my life, and for those hours I experienced them again, sitting on the floor among my records.
I have sometimes thought that I should recreate that morning once or twice a year: sit alone, play the old records and let them take me wherever they choose.
I have never done it.
Perhaps memories know when they should remain memories.
From Rock to Disco—and Back to Rebellion
After the great years of rock and hippie culture came disco.
People danced, dressed impressively and appeared to spend rather less time examining the meaning of the lyrics. This may be an unfair judgement from a man who was already attached to another musical era. Every generation suspects that the next one has somehow misunderstood music.
Rebellion returned in different forms through punk and later rap. Both gave anger, exclusion and social criticism a voice.
Those forms of music never became mine. Age has something to do with it. Music often enters most deeply when we are young, before our tastes have acquired locks, alarm systems and a clearly marked private property sign.
I still return to what I regard as the old and good: Pink Floyd, the Eagles and Leonard Cohen.
Younger listeners may interpret “old and good” as two separate words describing the listener rather than the music.
They may not be entirely wrong.
Pink Floyd and the Questions That Remain
With Pink Floyd, the music and the words have both stayed with me.
Another Brick in the Wall touches something I have resisted throughout my life: the expectation that people should fit the same mould, accept the same instructions and become convenient versions of one another.
I have never been particularly convenient.
The questions that song raises for me deserve more space than a few paragraphs in an article about music. They concern how we are brought up, how we are taught and how much of ourselves we surrender in exchange for acceptance.
The song Time reaches me differently as I grow older. Its account of years slipping away while we assume there is still plenty of time becomes harder to dismiss. The plans we postpone do not remain untouched while they wait. We change. Other people change. Some opportunities disappear.
Then there is Learning to Fly, from the period after Roger Waters had left the band.
I hear uncertainty in it, but also the determination to try and the exhilaration of discovering that something new is possible. For me, that speaks beyond flying itself. Experience does not spare us from becoming beginners again.
These songs have accompanied me for years.
I have not finished thinking about them.
The Eagles and the Men We Became
I have been to only two concerts in my life.
The Eagles and Leonard Cohen.
I consider that enough. As far as I am concerned, I saw the best.
The Eagles produced music that can sound relaxed and effortless until one listens properly. Beneath the harmonies are stories about restlessness, temptation, loneliness, excess, regret and men who do not always know how to escape the lives they have created.
Desperado changes as the listener grows older. A young man may hear romance in the solitary figure who refuses to settle down. An older man may hear the warning more clearly.
Take It Easy sounds lighter, yet even the title becomes useful advice for men who have spent decades believing that every problem can be solved by applying more pressure.
Hotel California remains beautiful, strange and slightly threatening. It has generated endless interpretations, which may be one reason it survives. The best songs leave enough room for us to bring something of ourselves into them.
Take It to the Limit has also acquired a different meaning with age. When we were young, the limit sounded like a place to conquer. Later, we discover that the body, work, relationships and time may each have their own opinion about where that limit lies.
The songs have not changed.
We have.
Leonard Cohen and the Cracks
Leonard Cohen was never in a hurry.
His songs often seem to arrive from somewhere below ordinary conversation. They contain love, desire, failure, faith, humour, darkness and the uncomfortable knowledge that human beings rarely fit neatly into the categories they create for themselves.
Everybody knows Hallelujah, although not everybody appears to have listened closely to the words.
Other songs have stayed with me just as strongly: Everybody Knows, I’m Your Man and, near the end of his life, You Want It Darker.
Cohen also wrote: “There is a crack in everything.”
That thought has followed me.
We all have cracks. Age does not remove them. If anything, it makes some of them more visible.
Yet the cracks are not only evidence of damage. They are also the openings through which we become reachable—by other people, by experience and sometimes by ourselves.
When I think about that image, I see light travelling in both directions.
The cracks allow light to reach us. They can also allow something of our own light to reach other people.
The things we have struggled with, the mistakes we have made and the losses we carry can make us more recognisable to someone else. A perfectly polished exterior does not impress me much. To me, it can suggest someone more concerned with maintaining a surface than allowing himself to be known—perhaps afraid to let anyone see the cracks beneath it.
A person who lets us see something of himself may be easier to trust.
That is my own extension of Cohen’s image.
I do not believe we have to conceal every crack before we have something worth offering.
Cohen did not offer the kind of optimism found on motivational posters.
He offered something better: the possibility that an imperfect life can still contain beauty, dignity and humour.
When Our Children Discover Our Music
Music has a peculiar habit of returning.
My eldest daughter, now forty-six, was astonished as a teenager to discover records by Meat Loaf and Queen in my collection. Music she regarded as belonging to her generation had already been sitting on my shelves.
Parents are occasionally more interesting than their children expect.
The discovery did not mean that she heard those records in the same way I did. She found them in another decade, among different friends and with different experiences attached to them. The songs became hers without ceasing to be mine.
This is one of music’s quiet miracles.
It can belong completely to millions of people at the same time.
More Than Nostalgia
It would be easy to dismiss our attachment to old music as nostalgia.
Some of it certainly is. We remember ourselves as younger, stronger and perhaps more attractive than the photographic evidence fully supports.
Still, music does more than flatter the past.
A familiar song can help us understand how much we have changed and what has remained. It can reconnect us with courage we had forgotten, grief we never fully expressed or a person we once loved. It can also create new memories. Old songs do not have to live only in old rooms.
Music can give energy to exercise, soften loneliness and make an ordinary drive feel briefly cinematic. It can bring people together, although sharing headphones with another person is less dignified than it sounds.
Most importantly, music helps preserve continuity.
We are not the same men we were at twenty, thirty or forty. Our bodies change. Our roles change. People leave us, and we sometimes lose parts of ourselves along the way.
Then a song begins.
For three or four minutes, the young man, the father, the doctor, the traveller and the older man all occupy the same room.
The music does not make us young again.
It reminds us that the young man never disappeared completely.