Memory Memo vol. III
'You've Got The Love'
Music can be one of the most powerful prompts for memory. Songs can take you back to specific moments in your life, in a way that other prompts can’t.
I create playlists where every day I add a new song. Selection is often driven by my mood, or sometimes by a memory that reminds me of a certain song that particular day. Now I can go back to periods of my life such as the 66 days I was sober over the summer and remember how I felt each day.
However, there are certain songs that take me back to visceral feelings, and because I have re-accessed those memories so many times - they exist almost like a vignette in my mind.
‘You’ve Got The Love’ by Florence + The Machine is one of these.
Whenever I hear that distinctive vocal hook in Florence’s bold voice, and the chirpy harp riff - I am taken back to a specific time, place, feeling, age, emotion.
I am driving in a car on the west coast of Scotland. Driving home with a friend’s mother who I had hardly known before the past few days’ holiday. I had travelled up to stay with my friend - my holidays on Colonsay marked much of my teenage angst, happiness, and growth.
I had talked a lot to this friend’s mother over the week - I always preferred talking to adults.
She encouraged me to pursue my dream of being creative, of being a rockstar. She told me stories of her drunken youth in Chelsea, the excitement of the future that I was about to enjoy.
She smoked the same Dunhill King Size cigarettes that my mother used to before I was born. She seemed so cool.
She tragically died of cancer not long after this.
I never got to tell her how important those few short days had been to me - giving me the final push to pursue creativity. I still dream of being a rockstar - but I have tried at least thanks, in part, to her (anyway being a founder is basically being a rockstar in today’s world, right?!).
The funny thing about memory is that prompts like a song can take you to multiple places at once - they all merge into a fuzzy, confused mess in our brains.
I am also taken to Latitude Festival. I am watching Florence + The Machine headline. My mother by my side. Her support for my ambition, her never ending support for me to do something I love - meant that she was standing in a muddy field with me.
Music has always been a creative passion for me. An interest that I found on my own - no teacher, parent, mentor, or family member pushing me towards it. For that reason my mother has always encouraged it. It still has such a powerful effect on my mood, helps me be myself, and gives me the most joy of any art form or experience in the world.
‘You Got The Love’ in a playlist on my Spotify account doesn’t give me all this context. I have to write a blog post to record this emotion, this depth, and provide the context on its importance. This context doesn’t sit behind Spotify’s algorithm that might recommend it to me, and it doesn’t understand the significance of it when it appears in my Spotify wrapped for the year.
It is this context that truly expresses the reason behind my ‘taste’ for this song, and with it, you can understand why on days when I am missing home, or missing my mother, or missing playing music with my friends, I might select this song as my pick on my daily song playlist.
This context is what creates a full memory around the prompt of the song. It is this context that we, at Create Something Good, are building ‘memo’ to capture. It is this context that will provide our ‘taste’ in the future, and help us record our personality over our lifetime.
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