How Does Music Affect Memory? Songs That Bring Back Memories

A host shares how songs like the Eagles, Bob Seger, and Simple Minds trigger memories from his teenage years, road trips, and divorce. Music anchors specific moments in life, and the host asks viewers which songs transport them back in time.
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You know, music is such an important part of our life that we forget that the impact that it has on us, we forget what it does to us, what it does to the emotions of us. You know, it brings us back to a time of maybe a first love or a first boyfriend or girlfriend, or a moment in time of, of something that was good in our life, or maybe how a song or music healed us. In case you weren't aware, recently one of the top songwriters of our generation— if you are my generation, I'm in my mid-50s— recently just passed away. His name is J.D. Souther, and he wrote many of the big hits of the '70s and the early '80s. If you're an Eagles fan, then you know his songs, Best of Our Love and Long Run, Heartache Tonight, a bunch of other great songs. Co-wrote Take It Easy with a number of the band members, and it got me thinking.
Hey, I'm Matthew Gillogly and I'm a Maverick. Well, what is a Maverick? A Maverick goes against the grain. We find our own way. And if you're sick and tired of being pushed around by the insurance companies, come join us. We'll show you the way out and you'll love medicine again.
You know, music is really the soundtrack of our life, right? It is the thing that cements memories.
In our life.
We always joke that when we take road trips with the guys on the golf trips, we need a song, we need a soundtrack, because every great road trip needs a soundtrack. And it got me thinking about all the different moments in my life and how I attach music to that, that the moment that I hear a song, it immediately takes me back to that time. I think of being in my basement at my mother's house and the first time that I heard the Eagles Hotel California album played in its entirety. On the loop in Chicago and how I immediately ran out and I bought that album, or CD I should say, and I'd play it constantly over and over and over again. And it just reminded me of, of a period in my life when I was about 16 years old and I was just free. I had just gotten a car and just how great life was. Or in the 1980s and 1985, Simple Minds, Don't You Forget About Me, and being a senior at Barrington High School, being in college, listening to music. Or watching my brother's bands play and how they'd always play Blue Sky and how it reminds me of the guitar solo Blue Sky from the Allman Brothers, how it always reminds me of my brother Tim. I'd be at Dirty Nellie's and they would play Blue Sky towards the end and my brother would— Tim would play that. And that song just every time I hear it, it just takes me back. I remember when I went broke and I remember listening to Against the Wind by Bob Seger over and over and over again, or in my divorce. How I would hear Highway 20 Ride, and as I was visiting my son and going back and forth and picking him up to see him on the weekends, and how that song would just take me back to that time. And it got me thinking, what are the songs in your life? What are the songs in your life that you hear that it automatically transports you back? We all have them, and I'm so— I'd love to know what are those songs. Post it in the comments below, because music As Don Henley said, it is the soundtrack of our life.
Hope you have a great night.
We'll see you later.
Bye.
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