A few years ago I was singing for a New Years Eve gala event. I remember during the rehearsal before the event started one of the other performers was singing My Way by Frank Sinatra. As I was busy worrying about my songs and making sure I remembered my lines and my entrances for the night I noticed one of the employees was absolutely enamored by this gentlemen practicing on stage.
She was an older woman whom I had talked with a few times before. I remember approaching her at that moment to ask her how she was doing. When I saw her face, she seemed almost entranced. She looked over and finally saw me standing next to her. Then she went on to explain that this song, My Way, was the song that was playing when her husband had proposed to her. She told me the whole story about the busy restaurant, the beautiful lights, the amazing band, and the quiet pier where he asked her to marry him. It was a scene from a movie.
After telling me all of this she looked down for the first time and told me that she had lost her beloved husband just a few months before.
Music has great power. It is especially powerful in making us remember moments from our life. When I hear certain songs I cannot help but be transported to pleasant, powerful, and sometime painful memories. There are certain songs that I can’t listen to because of what they make me remember. I am sure there are songs that do the same thing for you.
This ins’t just some made up occurrence. It is known that within our brains music stimulates the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. These are areas concerned with both emotions and building/retrieving memories. Memory retrieval from music has even been used on patients with advanced Alzheimer’s to recall distant memories and activate certain parts of their brain.
To me the music I listen to is the key to my greatest memories. I’ve never been one to take many pictures or to journal about my day. But I have always listened to music. Because of that Michael Jackson will always remind me of late night practice sessions in my room. Elvis Presley will always remind me of cleaning my room when I was little. Bill Evans and Vulfpeck will always remind me of my sisters. Hank Mobley will always remind me of my weekend job as a janitor. Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky will always remind me of writing essays in a coffee shop.
And My Way will always remind me of that wonderful woman on New Years Eve with whom I now share a great friendship. And I will never forget that moment we shared when we danced to her favorite song as the whole world stood still and watched us.
My Way – Frank Sinatra
Happy listening
Steve Acker
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