music that takes you back to a time when...

[M3CHK1LLA]

what music, albums, bands really take you back to the past? when you hear certain songs, you cant help but think...

maybe times were going good, or maybe they weren't...

where were you? what/who was special at that time?

 

[TedEH]

I tend to associate songs with people moreso than with times. I guess those songs arguable could be said to "take me back" to the point where that connection was made maybe.

I have an old friend who was obsessed with Green Day for a while (to the point that we made a cover band in high school), so Green Day songs (and other pop-punk, emo-ish, some metal-core) tend to remind me of that high school group.

I used to be really into Sum 41 for a while. It's again, something I associate with certain high school friends, but I also just genuinely liked the band. There was definitely a time that I was into pop-punk and radio/dad rock, your Nickelbacks and Creeds and all those bands that sound kinda the same. It was also a formative time for my guitar playing.

I've got one friend in particular who always had a very different taste in music from the rest of us, but some of the tunes he picked out tended to be the gems hidden in genres I didn't otherwise care for. He was also always really up to date with his pop and culture references, so it's easy to associate the music I picked up from him with the time those tunes were cool.

There was a lady I had a thing for in high school who also played guitar and sang, and she had a lot of influence on my non-heavy music listening. So I tend to associate more singer-songwriter-y stuff, folk music, indie bands, stuff like that with her and that group of friends.

I have a friend who taught me to appreciate operas, and some of the more "classical" (for lack of a better word) side of music.

The first "band" I played in was all family members, who played a lot of radio hits and classic tunes, so there's a fair number of associations there.

The more I think about it, the more examples keep coming up. I think I make a lot more music-to-people and music-to-times associations than I usually think about.

 

[wankerness]

I think basically every song I have any memory of hearing at a younger age catapults me back to whatever that younger age was. Thus, this post could be as long as possible listing every song I heard before I entered the workforce and ended having a life.

 

[TedEH]

This thread has reminded me that I have a "nostalgia" playlist in Spotify for just the occasions where I feel like diving into that mood and thinking back about the people I associate those tunes with.

 

[chuggalug]

Poison the Well, Dead to Fall, Everytime I Die, Thrice, The Human Abstract, Atreyu...all those bands remind me of back in my Jr. High and High School days, they each dropped some pretty ground breaking albums during those years.

Even prior to my metal days I listened to alot of old AFI, Misfits, Green Day, Strung Out, Millencolin.

 

[Ralyks]

Most of what would fall under 90’s Alternative Rock. Gin Blossoms, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains, Dave Matthews Bands, Verve Pipe, Live, Cranberries, Pearl Jam, Sugar Ray... Those were the days for me...

 

[spudmunkey]

"Pain" from Stereomud, Full Devil Jacket, Apartment26, KMFDM and Acumen Nation all remind me of the road-trips when I was moving and drove from WI to CA twice in a month. The sound track to that summer, basically.

Gin Blossoms and Our Lady Peace remind me of the summer of the best sex of my life, with the hottest woman I was ever with.

 

[BrailleDecibel]

"Pain" from Stereomud, Full Devil Jacket, Apartment26...

Those first 3 bands take me directly back to junior high/high school, but throw in Taproot, Lo-Pro, 6gig, From Zero, 40 GRiT, and countless other nu-metal bands.

 

[SJShinn]

I was never really a fan, but late 90's and early 2000's pop punk if I ever hear it, is like a time machine back to my middle/high school days and all the friends I had back then. I dont actually like the music itself, but it's like a direct link back to the parties and shenanigans. Good times, haha. I was on Death, Carcass, Megadeth etc... at the time, but nobody would give me control of the boombox.

 

[Spicypickles]

Master O' Puppets, straight high school feels

 

[FILTHnFEAR]

Prong, Danzig, Clutch, Deftones, Korn, Gwar, Bad Religion, Incubs, Acid Bath, Monster Magnet, Pantera, Helmet, Quicksand, White Zombie, Sepultura, Orange 9mm, are among the many from my early/mid 90's jr. high/high school era that I saw live and jammed to with some of the best friends I've ever had. Some of which I'm still close to today.

 

[M3CHK1LLA]

I tend to associate songs with people moreso than with times. I guess those songs arguable could be said to "take me back" to the point where that connection was made maybe.

yeah...some songs remind me of certain people.

a good friend of mine who has long since passed, was a huge fan of s.o.d. & m.o.d. we discovered their albums 'speak english or die!' and 'u.s.a. for m.o.d.' one summer and jammed it for ages. always reminds me of the summers we spent working together and school.

I think basically every song I have any memory of hearing at a younger age catapults me back to whatever that younger age was. Thus, this post could be as long as possible listing every song I heard before I entered the workforce and ended having a life.

lol...make the list, that's what this thread is all about

This thread has reminded me that I have a "nostalgia" playlist in Spotify for just the occasions where I feel like diving into that mood and thinking back about the people I associate those tunes with.

speaking of...

i was gonna burn some cd's (yes i still burn cd's lol) of nothing but 80's metal, thrash and punk

 

[HUGH JAYNUS]

King’s X -Dogman:
pre junior high moving into a big ass house and basically had it to myself for a month because i was moving from next door and the landlord liked us. So she let me clean it up to get ready and i moved in immediately while my lazy ass mom and brother took their time. Older brother gave me this album on tape and i blasted it over and over again. I was also still in the early stages of learning guitar and failed miserably at learning songs from it. Also met my best friend and my first girlfriend (they were cousins) at the same time. Fucking loved it.

Metallica- Garage Inc:
Junior high. Got this album for xmas along with some of my favorite video games and i spent a few weeks binging on them since i also got pneumonia, almost died, and was forced to take time out of school. This album, Duke Nukem Time To Kill, Final Fantasy VII, and Gex Enter The Gecko were my whole life for nearly a month as i was bed ridden. Great times.

There are more, but these two are the strongest for whatever reason

 

[M3CHK1LLA]

^ garage inc was so awesome...and quite underrated imho.

i bought it on cassette lol

 

[Seybsnilksz]

Albums always remind me of the season I discovered them.

Chess (the musical): Building Star Wars Lego.

Porcupine Tree - Fear of a Blank Planet: Autumn.

Porcupine Tree - In Absentia: Playing Super Mario 64 on my Nintendo DS

Porcupine Tree - Signify: Starting my sixth year in primary school and playing Call of Duty: World at War a few years later.

Porcupine Tree - On the Sunday of Life: More Call of Duty: World at War (especially the DLC:s).

Porcupine Tree - Stupid Dream: Obvious christmas record.

Threshold - Dead Reckoning: Skiing at school with my crush who had no idea.

Opeth - Ghost Reveries: Right when winter has disappeared and spring emerges.

Threshold - Subsurface: Getting turned down from said crush right around the beginning of summer break.

Storm Corrosion - Storm Corrosion: Hanging out with my friends on a semi-moist summer night hours after the crush-thing (same day as I bought Cubase actually).

Steven Wilson - Insurgentes: Hot summer in a car my family rented while our other one was on repairs. The one we rented didn't have properly working air condition.

Opeth - Orchid/Morningrise: Another summer, but in a better car.

Dream Theater - Octavarium: I discovered the songs slowly over something like 4-5 years, so strangely, "The Root of all Evil" is a song for christmas break and "Octavarium" is a summer song.

Katatonia - Night is the new Day: Late summer. Biking with friends and having a sore throat at the same time.

Meshuggah - Catch Thirty-Three: Failing the theory and nailing the driving test for my licence.

Opeth - Pale Communion: Moving to a new city and starting uni.

Textures - Phenotype: Going by train to my girlfriend. Late May, a bit cloudy but still warm.

 

[bostjan]

what music, albums, bands really take you back to the past? when you hear certain songs, you cant help but think...

maybe times were going good, or maybe they weren't...

where were you? what/who was special at that time?

There is so much material to work with here.

I'm going to focus on one album that I love and that makes me feel a very certain way:

Buckethead's Somewhere Over the Slaughterhouse

Feel free to stop reading here. The rest of this post is me reflecting on an existential crisis I had at the time that no one cares about.

It's summer of 2001, and I was at peak stupidity. I had just quit a nice job at the post office. I had been putting in overtime every holiday, but had not been paid for any of it because of an error in payroll. I was scheduled to work on Memorial Day, but still had not been paid for working Thanksgiving, New Years, nor MLK day, so I told my boss that if I came in to work on Memorial Day and didn't get paid for it that pay period, I was going to quit. And the error still hadn't been fixed by the next Thursday, so I didn't get paid, so I quit. Simultaneous with that, the band I had been in for 5 or so years and had been super stable was falling apart because the drummer and singer were in a feud. My financial outlook was sketchy, since I had not been responsible with my funds from the post office job - I was buying too many guitars and going to a lot of concerts. I took a shitty job waiting tables for less than $2/hr on weekends and took a job making 10% commission as a sales clerk at a pawn shop. My paychecks went from $400/week to, well, nothing really. My pawn shop checks usually bounced, since the accountant at the shop was too busy with booze and prostitutes to do his job. My restaurant stubs were usually just telling me that my hourly wage wasn't even enough to cover the taxes withheld for the IRS from what I was "expected" to have been making from tips. I was also taking a couple of summer classes at Uni, but they were all off-campus, and one was a class I had to retake because I flunked it the first time around, and there was a long story around that as well, but, needless to say, I really didn't care about this class (I ended up getting a 4.0 out of 4.0 the second time, even though I put <10% of the effort into it as the first time, but again, that's all another story). I was also taking a class in Ordinary Differential Equations that was kicking my ass, in terms of how much energy it was taking me to keep up with my teacher's expectations and my own expectations. It ended up being my lowest ever grade in a mathematics class to date.

Also, I had started seeing this girl at exactly that same time frame. She was one of those people who knows a bunch of people you know, but you never met...well, until I met her. I think a big part of it was where I was in my life at the exact moment we met. I saw her as a person, and that wasn't who she really was, or something. Anyway, we started casually dating and I thought things were going really well, but I knew she was also seeing other guys, and I thought I had made it clear that I expected to move things to an exclusive relationship if things worked out. When things were seeming to work out and she stopped seeing the other guys she was seeing, but started seeing new other guys, I think it just tipped me over the edge on which I was already teetering. I had been furthermore financially irresponsible in trying to win her over during the two or so months that was going on.

The net sum of all of this was that I was living off of parboiled rice and an occasional can of beans or cup of Manchurian noodle soup, and, worst of all, washing it down with vodka most of the time. Yeah, I'm an alcoholic. I'd love to say that I *was* an alcoholic then, since it was so long ago, but just because I haven't had problems with it since the end of the summer of 2001 doesn't mean that it's not there. And the problems I had with it back then were enough to culminate in me winding up in the ICU with alcohol poisoning...

During all of that, I listened to a lot of Somewhere Over the Slaughterhouse. The album had a messed-up sound to it. Buckethead's playing was genius, but he was going through his phase of playing things intentionally off. I felt that about my own life at the time. Here I was studying Physics at the university, getting good grades, usually perfect ones, except this one class the year before, and, for awhile, I had a great job most college-age young people could only dream of having, so I felt like a genius, but then, based off of my own stubbornness and addiction to principles, I quit that nice job, and based off of a bitter feeling I had over a poor academic experience, I was intentionally trying to flub a free retake of that problem class. It was, like, over the course of two weeks, that I wound up barely able to cover my own living expenses and almost ended up living out of my car and/or dropping out of school. It was like my life was intentionally off, just as that album was intentionally fucked up sounding.

So, when autumn came and full time classes started again, I managed to land myself a much better job at the University, and I had decided to stop drinking flat out, and I decided to put away that album, stopped trying to start a relationship with that girl, and start a new chapter of my life.

 

[wankerness]

Pat Metheny Group - Still Life/Letter From Home, Pat Metheny - Secret Story - My dad got these when they first came out and played them all the time. I would have been 8 when the last of them came out. I REALLY liked them as a little kid, particularly "Last Train Home," which I'd frequently demand he play by referring to it as "the train song" since it had train whistles in it. I sort of forgot about them until I was in college and was exposed again to Pat Metheny. I was VERY surprised when I listened to these three albums and basically knew the entire things note for note, since I'd forgotten about hearing them as a sub-10 year old and never knew what the albums were called or anything. I just internalized them.

Disney - Fantasia music - I got really into Fantasia when I was ~4-6 and had a tape that my parents made me of some of the pieces from it. It made me HYPED. It had another cartoony piece great for a nerdy kid (Sabre Dance, later known to me as the theme of the masturbating bear on Conan). It was one of my earliest loves and I remember dancing like a moron to it with my little brother.

Movie soundtracks, particularly Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Return of the Jedi - John Williams was my other great love as a little kid. I recorded any isolated pieces of the soundtracks that I could off the TV with a walkman and listened to them. These two were my favorites by far. I was also big on some of the current Godzilla soundtracks and did the same thing (Godzilla Vs Destroyer, Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla 93, Godzilla Vs Mothra 92, Godzilla 1985). I was pretty cool.

Megadeth - Hidden Treasures - particularly Breakpoint/99 Ways to Die - This was the first "rock" album I ever got, and it was kind of forced on me after I said I liked Megadeth as a self-defense mechanism when some metalhead asked me what I liked, and Megadeth was the coolest name that came to mind. I ended up actually liking the damn thing, and it set the stage for the rest of my independent musical life. I got their "actual" albums next, including getting Cryptic Writings the day it came out, and I stayed a big fan until "the World Needs a Hero" came out and it was so garbage that I sold it back to the store.

Smashmouth - Fush Yu Mang - This was the second album I bought to "be cool." PRETTY COOL! To be fair, at least it's not the album with "All Star" (which I've never heard, but I believe buckled down on the vintage "Walking on the Sun" sound). It's more a really dumb commercialized ska/punk album. And it had some naughty lyrics by middle school standards!!

Chumbawamba - Tubthumper - another good starter rock album. This is weird as hell and I still get a real kick out of it. The title track doesn't even hint at where this thing goes.

Third Eye Blind - S/T, Foo Fighters - Colour and the Shape - these were the fourth and fifth albums I got to "be cool," and I guess I really dodged a bullet since both of them actually kind of hold up today, especially the second. Third Eye Blind had pretty intricate guitarwork on some songs and songs that had bits in 5/8, etc and if you ignored Jumper and Semi-Charmed Life was a pretty great alt-rock album. The Colour and the Shape had Everlong, which was one of my first big song loves, and remains so to this day. I heard a college coverband play it just last year, I think its status has only grown through the years, since at the time it got buried under Monkey Wrench, Walking After You and My Hero when it came to MTV (which are also awesome).

Handsome - Quiet Liar, Radiohead - How to Disappear Completely, Glassjaw - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence/Motel of the White Locust/Lovebites and Razorlines - Ah, the soundtrack of being a highschooler pissed off/sad about various girls. I had a burned CD with these and I forget what else on it. I remember putting it on while driving at night after dropping friends off many a time.

Blur - Parklife (I think? It might be a different album of theirs) - full album, particularly that one weird carnival sounding song that keeps getting faster - I had a girlfriend that was pretty into Blur and the week she got this album was one that I was visiting her on campus. She basically listened to it the entire week, and we had sex to it probably about 15 times, so I can't hear it without thinking of that. Ugh.

Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes - I listened to this and its B-sides a zillion times in college, and it occasionally functioned as a source of comfort. Even today if I turn on Mother or Upside Down, I feel really soothed as soon as the vocals come in. I still skip a couple of annoying songs and the rape one that makes me too upset.

 

[Albake21]

Every time I listen to Periphery 1, it always brings me back to that time of 2009/2010. A time much simpler/relaxing time for me. It's crazy how much has changed from then till now.

 

[ArtDecade]

Blur - Parklife (I think? It might be a different album of theirs) - full album, particularly that one weird carnival sounding song that keeps getting faster - I had a girlfriend that was pretty into Blur and the week she got this album was one that I was visiting her on campus. She basically listened to it the entire week, and we had sex to it probably about 15 times, so I can't hear it without thinking of that. Ugh.

Weird. When I was in college, I used to have sex with this chick that was always cheating on her significant other - and that is the album she always put on.

 

[synrgy]

Not to poo on the concept, but for me it's pretty much 'music from [x time period] takes me back to [x time period].'

90's music takes me back to the 90's. 80's music takes me back to the 80's. 00's music takes me back to the 00's. And so on.

But there are moments here and there that are a little more specific. This isn't something I'd normally steer toward; I'd actually forgotten about it completely, but.. Last night somebody reminded me of Def Leppard's "Love Bites", and HOLY HELL, within a few notes I was suddenly 11 years old on Summer vacation with my family.