Last night, I was half-watching something benign on TV – otherwise known as looking at recipe posts on Instagram – when an ad for… something? something to do with photos, I think? popped up on the television, backed by “We Only Come Out at Night” by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Instantly, I was transported back to freshman year of high school. The sole lasting positive from my boyfriend at the time (shudder) is that he introduced me to some music that I truly loved – Joan Osborne and The Cranberries and The Smashing Pumpkins. My parents got me a copy of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness for Christmas and I listened to every song on repeat until the notes wove themselves into the fabric of that part of my history. Even now, the few notes of “We Only Come Out at Night,” with their forlorn whimsy, wrap me in the memories of that year. Fragments I haven’t considered for decades: the purple suede coat I felt so grown up wearing, the vague, looming threat of “hazing” by fearsome high school girls, how horrible I was at debate team, the violet contact lenses that made me feel cool and mysterious, my unsettling attraction to this boyfriend who turned out to be cruel in the astonishing number of ways that high school boys can be cruel.

The Smashing Pumpkins provided the soundtrack to my sophomore year, too. Unbeknownst to one another, my boyfriend at the time (a different, much less threatening guy) and I each got each other the Smashing Pumpkins box set – our identical taste in music a sure sign (I thought) of our True Love Forever (no). I listened to every single song on every single CD in the five-album set. When he broke up with me, out of the blue, later that spring, I listened to “The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)” at ear-shattering volumes in my pickup and on my boombox in my bedroom as I sobbed with betrayal and grief.

The boombox, I received as a Christmas gift in sixth grade, alongside two CDs, both which became my soundtrack for early middle school: Bonnie Raitt’s Luck of the Draw and Sammy Kershaw’s Don’t Go Near the Water. They were the first CDs I had ever owned, and I felt so grown up singing “Something to Talk About” from the comfort of my own bedroom! I used that boombox to record Top 40 songs off the country music countdown on the radio every Sunday, lying on my stomach in front of it, ready at a second’s notice to hit record as soon as the first notes of the song I wanted started to play.

Before that, “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles rings through my memory. My childhood best friend and I would choreograph elaborate roller skating routines in my basement. She would provide the music – she had Tiffany and Bangles cassette tapes! – and we would pretend to be sophisticated women with wild 80s hair (her name was always Samantha Fox in these scenarios, and she was married to Michael J.) as we skated around to “Manic Monday.” We invited my brother and his nanny down to watch one of our performances, only to stop short during practice, shocked, when Susanna Hoffs sang, “Come on honey, let’s go make some noise.” I had no idea what that meant, but my friend understood the implications enough to know we couldn’t skate to it  in front of a grown up, and we cancelled the show.

My friend – and roommate, at the time – made me a mix CD that I listened to on repeat every day during the summer before my junior year of college. I was living in Atlanta, interning at a ministry and I ran for miles and miles on the weekends, DiscMan in hand, trying to outrun my loneliness with only her CD for company. To this day, Coldplay’s “Yellow” and “Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)” by Blu Cantrell and “Drive” by Incubus and Melanie’s “Brand New Key” remind me of that summer, running endless, aching circles around a high school track in the thick Georgia heat, and, always, of my friend.

My husband is always listening to and finding new songs for us to enjoy. There are so many songs representing our time together, no single song stands out as About Him. He put “The Trouble with Poets” on the first mix CD he made me. We listened to Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” on our first trip to Europe. Every time I see the HBO logo, I hear the beginning strains of the intro to The Sopranos, which was the first real series he and I watched together. There’s the Jack Johnson song he played for me on my desktop in our grad school apartment. For some reason, “Sober” is always the song that autoplays when he connects his phone to the sound system in his car. We danced to “I Only Have Eyes for You” at our wedding. We have so many years together, this period of life spans decades (already!), that nearly every song reminds me of him.

“Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line and “Wagon Wheel” by Darius Rucker and, especially, Chopin’s “Berceuse” were the sonic backdrop to my pregnancy. I often listened to the country music station as I drove to work, and these two songs stand out to me as being both oft-played and joyful in a way that cut through the anxiety and anticipation of waiting for Carla to arrive. And the Chopin. Well. I played that on repeat for the entirety of many, many commutes, sobbing along the way at the beauty of the music and the impossibility that I was – God willing – about to become a mother.

Lorde’s “The Royals” is a song I listened to over and over during the first few weeks (months?) of my daughter’s life. It’s a song that is now forever infused by the confusion and panic and dread of those early postpartum days. Just hearing the first few bars of snaps bring it all rushing back – the fear, the fear, the fear. The desire to get in my car and keep driving, forever and ever, away from the fear.

As Carla has gotten older, the soundtrack has been ever-changing. It’s rotated through all the songs from Frozens1 and 2 and the Descendantsmovies to “Be Nice” by the Black Eyed Peas and the entire Jonas Brothers oeuvre, especially Happiness Begins, and then through every songfrom the LEGO Movie 2. (Right before the pandemic started, we would listen to “Queen of Mean” and “Gotham City Guys” on repeat for literal HOURS.) The tracks of Carla’s life so far would also include “Moon River” and instructional ditties from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhoodand “The Letter of the Day” and the entire 1989 album.

My daughter still, at nearly-seven, wakes up singing, always has a song on her lips. (Carla is so into the music that she told my husband, one night, that she couldn’t fall asleep because she kept “bursting into song” – her words.) I wonder which music, when heard as nostalgic snippets as commercial backgrounds in twenty years, will bring the early days of 2020 crushing back into focus? I wonder which will stand out as representative of six- and seven-year-old Carla? Will I refer to Carla’s early elementary years as the Jonas Brothers years? The Frozen years?

And what of now, during the pandemic?

I have, I admit, been kind of avoiding music. I don’t WANT to hear a snippet of Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” (which is a BOP) in thirty years and feel the panic and stress of the pandemic wash over me. That is seems deeply unfair to the music and the artists.

When I need something musical these days, I’ve been asking our Echo to play classical piano music and Golden Oldies – “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and “My Girl” and the like; for me, they’re already timeless, untethered to any particular segment of my life. So I’m trusting that “Sugar Pie Honeybunch” or Chopin’s Waltz No. 1 in E Flat won’t somehow become the soundtrack to the pandemic in my brain.

What songs take you back to specific moments in your life? Are you listening to any specific music these days? Do you have a Pandemic Theme Song?