As someone who documents his travels, I have plenty of literal reminders of the places I have been. The thing is about such mementos, be they photos or essays, is that I have dust them off and go through them in order to be transported back to where I was when I created them.
When it comes to music, the story is different. For example, I can hear one note of a certain song, and immediately be taken back to where I was a particular time I heard it: Sights, smells, sounds, sensations – the whole shebang. For me, music is a portal not only to spatial travel, but time travel.
Below are five songs which take me back not only to places I have been, but to past incarnations of myself.
“Sheets” – Promise and the Monster
When I moved to Shanghai in 2009, it was right as the cold, grey Chinese winter was beginning, so I traveled primarily using the Shanghai Metro. It was not only fast and efficient, but kept me safely insulated from the low temperatures, even if the world became cold and strange in its own way, so far beneath the streets of the city.
Just before I flew over the Pacific, a friend of mine had recommended Swedish singer-songwriter Billie Lindahl (who releases music under the pseudonym “Promise and the Monster”) and her album Transparent Knives to me.
The album, and in particular the desolate, atmospheric single “Sheets,” proved to be the perfect companion to my daily metro rides, and listening to it still conjures up memories of the unsure, lonely and ever-so-slightly lost boy who rode quietly through the catacombs of China’s largest city with little more than a dream to keep him warm.
“Animal” – Miike Snow
By the time I arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in April 2011, my Shanghai gamble had long since paid off. Although the general circumstances of my life were better, I arrived to Rio after more than two months backpacking through South America entirely overland, which meant that some of the colorful exuberance of iconic beaches like Ipanema and Copacabana was lost on me.
“Caught a Long Wind” – Feist
I’m a longtime Feist fan, so when I discovered that her then-new album Metals had leaked as I was traveling through Egypt in September 2011, I didn’t let the fact that I was meant to sail the Nile in less than an hour sway me from downloading it – I almost missed my felucca boat because I wanted it so bad!
The good news is that I didn’t miss my boat, and the better news is that the downbeat, meditative, moody songs on the album proved the perfect companion on the slow moving boat as it inched its way up the longest river in the world.
In particular “Caught a Long Wind,” the third track, was appropriate, and not just because of how perfectly its sparse instrumentation and haunting vocals fit the color of the sky as the sun set and the moon rose.
The lyrics, which see Feist comparing her own success to a bird with the fortune of catching a long, fast wisp of wind as it’s flying through the air, mirrored my own psychological process at that point, just over a year into the lifestyle I now consider a permanent one. Would the wind soon go still – would I lose flight and crash into the ground?
“The Final Countdown” – Europe
Fast-forward a year to September 2012 and I’m in Chiang Mai, Thailand, having circled the globe a couple times to get there, visiting places like Australia, Colombia and Norway en route. I’m now making money completely from this blog, and although there are as always some issues to deal with, the circumstances of my life are, on the whole, less heavy.
To be sure, the song that most reminds me of this time is the awesomely bad 80s anthem, “The Final Countdown.” The reason? The song – a grainy, static-filled version of the song, which I can only assume played from a cassette tape actually bought in the 80s – was the soundtrack to a cobra show I saw that day in Chiang Mai.
I’m not sure if the guy intended the connection between the concept of a “final countdown” and the imminent death his workers faced teasing and torturing deadly snakes, or if he just liked the song, but I can never hear it even again without thinking of his goofy smile as he informed the audience of how fucked we’d all be if the cobras got loose.
“The Fall” – Rhye
As we pulled out of our tacky hotel onto the Vegas strip, I heard the song whose video I have posted above for the first time.
Performed by an artist called Rhye, whom I assumed was a Sade-like female singer before I realized he was a man who formerly released music under the name Milosh, “The Fall” is a loungey, mid-tempo number whose lyrics are at once joyful and melancholy, simultaneously celebratory of a great love and fearful of losing it.
The song proved to be all-too-representative of the love Nishant and I found and, unfortunately lost. After a romantic (but turbulent) weekend in San Francisco, he flew back to Australia and I flew back to Austin.
Although we both seemed to be in agreement RE: making it last and meeting again sooner rather than later, our fear proved to be greater than our faith, and we slowly lost touch with one another – I haven’t heard from him in more than two months.
Robert Schrader is a travel writer and photographer who’s been roaming the world independently since 2005, writing for publications such as “CNNGo” and “Shanghaiist” along the way. His blog, Leave Your Daily Hell, provides a mix of travel advice, destination guides and personal essays covering the more esoteric aspects of life as a traveler.
