After sitting and watching two straight days of Marco Rubio's congressional hearings — hey, someone's gotta do it — I decided to take Thursday off from writing. (Well, mostly. Mr. Secretary decided to drop a boatload of major Cuban sanctions and disrupt my day off.)
And when I say I took the whole day off, I mean I spent about eight and a half hours cutting grass and working in my garden, minus a break for lunch. Today, I'm quite sore, but I needed it. The last few weeks have been pretty stressful with my dad being sick and a few other things going on, and I just needed a day of being outside, putting my hands in the dirt, moving my body, and not looking at a computer screen.
Apparently, I also needed a 1990s-era karaoke hour or two. By around 6:30, I'd gotten tired of listening to my own music collection, so I switched over to Pandora's (Pandora for life — I don't do Spotify) "'90s Alternative" station. Bush's "Glycerine" was playing. I was already in a pretty good mood, but that's a song that can lift it even higher instantly. As can Sublime's "What I Got," which is what played next.
Before I knew it, I was planting peppers and marigolds and being "Ironic" with Alanis, Dave Matthews was crashing into me, Green Day was whining about nothing and everything all at once, "Mr. Jones" was striking up a conversation, I was going "The Distance" with Cake, Darius Rucker was explaining how the Dolphins make him cry, I was promising The Offspring that I'd keep 'em separated, Beck was being a "Loser," Radiohead was being a "Creep," and Eddie Vedder didn't want me to call him "Daughter." As the sun went down, I ended the night "Losing My Religion" with R.E.M., taking a "Last Dance with Mary Jane," and contemplating who exactly is Liam and Noel Gallagher's "Wonderwall."
By the time I hobbled into the house, I was sore and covered in dirt, sweat, and mosquito bites, but I had a huge smile on my face. There's something about that era of music. I can remember every word to every song, even the ones I didn't like much back then. This is the music of my youth, my coming-of-age years — a time when I felt like I held a million possibilities for my life in the palms of my hands. Anything seemed possible.
For most of us, the music we listen to in our younger years has a greater impact on us than the music we discover as adults. Science seems to suggest that 14 years old is the magical age, that the music you listen to in eighth or ninth grade influences your tastes for life. Some say it's a wider age range, like 13 to 17, and a study out of Finland suggests your sex has something to do with it: "men form their deepest musical attachments around age 16, while women peak closer to 19."
But in my research, I've found several potential explanations for this, though they're all pretty connected. Slate's Mark Joseph Stern says it has to do with neurons in the brain. When we like a song, our brain releases the happy hormones that make us feel good. When you're young, that process is even stronger:
Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development — and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural connections to a song, we also create a strong memory trace that becomes laden with heightened emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that everything is incredibly important — especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams (and embarrassments)…
About a decade ago, artist Elizabeth Wagele spoke with Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, who said it had more to do with our social lives — that we associate the music with the connections we made in those years. Wagele said she felt this was only true for extroverts, and this introvert will have to agree with her.
While I can conjure up memories of my friend Jenni introducing me to Green Day when we walked to her house after school one day or my friend Jessica and I listening to Sugar Ray when we'd go watch the Atlanta Falcons practice during the summer, and Pearl Jam's "Yellow Ledbetter" will always make me think of a crush I had on a guy named Jason, I don't necessarily associate music that way overall.
An article from the BBC suggests that "researchers have found there is a key age between the ages of 10 to 30-years-old when the reminiscence bump applies, meaning our memories have a particular affinity for recalling events," which matches what Stern said. Here's more:
The reminiscence bump happens for everything – our favourite books, films, sports stars and music, but evidence suggests music features most highly because musical memories are stored in a ‘safe’ area of the brain which is more resilient and protected against age related conditions.
'Music is one of the most fundamental ways that we can express emotions,' says Prof Catherine Loveday, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Westminster.
Prof Loveday has extensively studied the relationship between music and memory. She spent the last eight years asking people about their music memories and their preference for music across a lifetime. She found there is a consistently reliable peak in both memory and preference for music people listened to during their teenage years.
Even when working with people in their eighties she found their strongest musical memories take them back to their youths. It’s not necessarily when the music was released that is relevant but rather the time frame during which the music was important to an individual.
One theory for why this happens is that our minds undergo an intense and rapid phase of development during our teenage years and early twenties so our budding brains and memory systems are at their peak absorbing as much information about the world as they can.
That study out of Finland that I mentioned suggests that it also has to do with forming our own identities. Choosing the music we listen to as teenagers helps us find independence, feel seen, or even rebel.
My opinion is that it's probably a little different for everyone. Backed by that surge in neurons and the reminiscence bump, the music of our adolescence takes us back to unique times in our lives. For some people, it might remind them of friends and social status; for others, maybe it was a way to rebel or form an identity.
As I said, for me, it was just a time when life was changing rapidly, and the future felt huge, like anything was possible. I'm sort of at a similar crossroads in life right now, so maybe that's why I find myself listening to those songs more and more these days. Or maybe it's some sort of mid-life desire to feel youthful again. Or maybe it's just that the 1990s were the best era of music of all time. I said what I said.
