The Weight, The Loss, The Songs
July 4, 2018 4:31 PM   Subscribe

"I don’t know what it is about songs that can make you feel the weight of people or their loss or the fact of your own. But they do." What Is the Most Nostalgic Song of All Time? Mike Jollett, for The Village Voice.
posted by MonkeyToes (99 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite
 
(heads up that link has one of those sketchy redirect hijacker ads)
posted by phunniemee at 4:33 PM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


ctrl-F Piaf ... ctrl-W
posted by multics at 4:40 PM on July 4, 2018 [6 favorites]


As Tears Go By
posted by markbrendanawitzmissesus at 4:55 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Cabo Verdean music seems deliberately engineered for this..
posted by Nerd of the North at 5:03 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yes there is a spotify playlist! Gonna get my gloom on.

I’m sure I could name a dozen songs that evoke this feeling for me but the first one that popped into my head was Beg Steal or Borrow.
posted by supercrayon at 5:04 PM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


The words Jim Croce have more nostalgia than an arbitrary six songs by any other artist.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:05 PM on July 4, 2018 [20 favorites]


For the music, or the mustache?
posted by darksasami at 5:12 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


The words Jim Croce have...

Imma let you finish, but Warren. Fucking. Zevon.
posted by multics at 5:12 PM on July 4, 2018 [16 favorites]


Hard Times, as performed by Bobby D., originally written by that specialist in besotted and wool-pully nostalgia, Stephen Foster.
posted by mwhybark at 5:14 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have never painted a room or moved out of an apartment without listening to the second disc of the first Ani DiFranco live album in its entirety.
posted by wreckingball at 5:14 PM on July 4, 2018 [11 favorites]




Alhough you know Little Rosewood Casket as performed by Bill Monroe rates. Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet deserves a mention but the song is less about nostalgia for the experience of a person lost to time as much as it is about death and loss. The two things are interrelated, mind.
posted by mwhybark at 5:17 PM on July 4, 2018


(also: it is not, never was, and never shall be The Weight by the fucking Band. Fuck that Virgil Caine guy.)
posted by mwhybark at 5:20 PM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


I haven't clicked any links but I will tell you The Wood Song from Indigo Girls is the most nostalgic song of all time. OF ALL TIME!
posted by hippybear at 5:22 PM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Is it not "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" by Sandy Denny?
posted by pracowity at 5:44 PM on July 4, 2018 [15 favorites]


Nostalgia is so personalized obviously. Laugg if you will but bubble gum pop from the 80s like Heaven Is A Place On Earth immediately transports me back to my childhood. I am a five year old girl and I am gonna skate my fuckin heart out to this.

Dave Matthews Band has the same effect. When you were a white kid in the burbs in California in the 90s you wound up listening to DMB, even if you were a punk and said they sucked and wore a Dead Kennedys tshirt to their concerts you got dragged to.

Likewise there’s a certain mainstream alternapop from the 90s that takes me back to junior high/high school. If You Steal My Sunshine, She Runs Away, If You Could Only See, Bittersweet Symphony, I Am 32 Flavors, Never There, Shadowboxer, Naked Eye, Tear Drop, Possession...I have an entire mix of this music I put on when I feel like I want to viscerally remember what it’s like to walk into a Wet Seal or look at a Delias catalogue.
posted by supercrayon at 5:44 PM on July 4, 2018 [19 favorites]


American Pie? Whatever you think about the song itself, it’s about nostalgia.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 5:55 PM on July 4, 2018 [16 favorites]


Fire and Rain.
posted by tzikeh at 6:04 PM on July 4, 2018 [7 favorites]


Fire and Rain is a song of mourning, not a song of nostalgia.

Although perhaps those are related emotions.
posted by hippybear at 6:06 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have an entire mix of this music I put on when I feel like I want to viscerally remember what it’s like to walk into a Wet Seal or look at a Delias catalogue.

This is a good place for folks to share their mixes, too. And yeah, "Fire and Rain."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:07 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Good playlist, but I too have to point out that nostalgia≠sad.
posted by Zedcaster at 6:09 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Something you personally listened to between the ages of 14 and 24 shit dude I'm not a mind reader
posted by atoxyl at 6:19 PM on July 4, 2018 [25 favorites]


And here I am listening to Automatic for the People right now.
posted by jokeefe at 6:21 PM on July 4, 2018 [7 favorites]


Siberry's The Walking.

There's nothing that will bring you back
There's nothing that will change this fact
There's nothing I will take back
posted by vers at 6:23 PM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


and yes, jokeefe, Nightswimming is one of my most personal definitions.
posted by vers at 6:26 PM on July 4, 2018 [16 favorites]


I mean, nostalgia comes in all flavors. For me, if you're looking for the one that was my parents' boring music when I was 5, fading to grudgingly meaningful at 15, ironic after discovering the Nimoy version, then sentimental and wiser than I understood but still sappy and now a general mishmash of every emotion, it's "Both Sides Now." I think I could sing a verse of that song about itself.

But if you just want me to physically taste a blue Construx knot in my mouth, that's a job for either "Missing You" by John Waite or "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)" by Tina Turner.
posted by darksasami at 6:26 PM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Those Were The Days
It Was a Very Good Year
Is That All There Is?
posted by ovvl at 6:42 PM on July 4, 2018 [4 favorites]




Celebrate Me Home
Those Were the Days
Time in a Bottle
Same Old Lang Syne
Take Me Home, Country Roads
Will the Circle Be Unbroken
posted by Miss Cellania at 6:50 PM on July 4, 2018 [4 favorites]


So, can we get a judge's ruling on the definition of "nostalgia" this article is using? Like, are we looking for songs about nostalgia itself? Because of so, yes, I agree with "Nightswiming".

But if we're talking "a song that makes me personally feel nostalgic"....

* Taj Mahal, Linin' Track and A LIttle Soulful Tune. Dad is a major Taj Mahal fan, and he plays side one of Taj's De Old Folks At Home a lot. I can remember being about six years old, sitting on the floor of the living room and Dad is holding my Snoopy doll while we listen to "Soulful Tune" - and in the middle, when Taj starts this scat-singing, Dad starts moving the head of the Snoopy like Snoopy's scatting and it makes me laugh and laugh. ...."Linin' Track" just puts me back in that living room with the picture window and the tan shag carpet and the fireplace and the hip-high built-in bookcase, the weird cut-out room dividers on top that Mom used to display knicknacks and my childhood bedroom around the corner from them.

* Three Dog Night Joy To The World, and Tracy Chapman Fast Car. Two car rides after high school graduation. ...After the graduation ceremony, my gang were all camping out in someone's back yard and partying; we all each got our congratulations from our parents, then each peeled off to our various transport. I returned my cap and gown, walked to the car that I was driving to Jen's house, and took off my heeled sandals before getting in and starting the car. And this song came on, and I pulled out of the parking lot and on to the rest of my life in my little white dress and stockings bellowing "JEREMIAH WAS A BULLFROG!!!!!"

The campout was exactly the kind of teenage sturm und drang you'd imagine, complete with soap-opera level romantic intrigues, people sneaking through the woods to scare each other, getting hopped up on sugar, and very little actual sleep. But the next morning we were all weirdly serious, since it would just be a couple more days before P went off to the mlitary and we were realizing "holy crap there are people we may never see again in our lives" and we had a sleep-deprived conversation about that, a bunch of us sitting in two quiet and awestruck rows in Jen's room, four of us in a row on her bed, four of us facing them in a row on the other bed in her room, the gray overcast sky making the light a dusty pink. People started to drift home to their various families after that, and so did I - a 20-minute drive back home, alone in a car, through tiny winding country roads in my hometown. They were unfamiliar roads, actually, as I hadn't ever been to Jen's - but I was also sleep-deprived, and was also pondering the whole "wow, the rest of my life will really be different from here on out." And "Fast Car' came on halfway home. And to this day - 30 years later - it is what I think of every time with that song.

....So, "Joy To The World" or "Linin' Track" may not be about nostalgia, but...yeah.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:13 PM on July 4, 2018 [6 favorites]


Personally, "Casey's Last Ride", as performed by John Denver.
posted by notsnot at 7:20 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


...and as I go to find it on Youtube, recommended for me: "Fade Into You", Mazzy Star. Pretty much makes a hole in me and fills it, over and over.
posted by notsnot at 7:25 PM on July 4, 2018 [8 favorites]


Herbie Hancock - Manhattan (Island of lights and love) - an instrumental, but to me it smacks of nostalgia for a certain time and place.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:32 PM on July 4, 2018


Boys of Summer, by Don Henley. Hungry and wistful at the same time.

And massive nostalgic favorite to me: Jersey Girl, by Bruce Springsteen. A friend now gone was a Jersey girl.
posted by datawrangler at 7:35 PM on July 4, 2018 [9 favorites]




Here's where the Story Ends. the Sundays
Autumn Sweater Yo la Tengo
posted by Chrischris at 7:37 PM on July 4, 2018 [7 favorites]


I’m Going to Go Back There Someday, Gonzo, The Muppet Movie 1979

YouTube link
posted by kmartino at 7:54 PM on July 4, 2018 [11 favorites]


If we're going with muppets, I'd say the Rainbow Connection has a place in the conversation.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:00 PM on July 4, 2018 [9 favorites]


Danny Boy. Not only are the lyrics nostalgic, but it makes everyone who listens nostalgic for a country they never even lived in.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:00 PM on July 4, 2018 [8 favorites]


I don't see how any song could possibly be more nostalgic than "I'll Be Seeing You", especially Billie Holliday's cover. But if we're going to go for deeper cuts, I'll put forth Kate Campbell's "Look Away", because it's about the long, painful, more-bitter-than-sweet process of confronting your own nostalgia for something (or someone) that's just wrong and leaving it behind.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:03 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


...and as I go to find it on Youtube, recommended for me: "Fade Into You", Mazzy Star. Pretty much makes a hole in me and fills it, over and over.

"Into Dust." That's all.
posted by atoxyl at 8:04 PM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


Lemme help, Lefty Lucky Cat:

Thirteen.

Charlotte sometimes.

The Unforgettable fire.

I'm On Fire. (Which I have special love for because of reasons.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:06 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've always thought there should be a CD length mix that starts with Boys Of Summer and ends with The Boys Are Back In Town. I don't know quite what should go in-between but....
posted by hippybear at 8:06 PM on July 4, 2018 [5 favorites]


And it's just hit me:

The first song listed in the article is the Van Morrison "Celtic New Year". According to conventional wisdom, the Celtic New Year, "Samhain", was on November 1st, making Halloween their New Year's Eve. And they believed something very much like the Mexican Dia de Los Muertos - that the spirits of those deceased were most able to try coming back for a visit on Celtic New Year.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:12 PM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


"Everything is free now " Gillian Welch. David Rawling's guitar defines nostalgia.
posted by Floydd at 8:15 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Warren Zevon is the edgy Jimmy Buffet.

There- I said it.


For most nostalgic song, your options are:

Charles Trenet: L'Âme des poètes.

The Go-Betweens: Cattle and Cane.

Tori Amos: Pretty Good Year.

Tom Waits: Kentucky Avenue.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:16 PM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


Oh, yeah- also, Emmylou Harris' version of Hickory Wind.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:34 PM on July 4, 2018




Unchained Melody. (I've always thought he's separated from his love by time, not distance.)
posted by she's not there at 9:11 PM on July 4, 2018 [5 favorites]


it's about the long, painful, more-bitter-than-sweet process of confronting your own nostalgia for something (or someone) that's just wrong and leaving it behind.

In that category, I nominate With or Without You. And if I never hear that song again it will be too soon.
posted by she's not there at 9:18 PM on July 4, 2018


ctrl-F Piaf ... ctrl-W

ctrl-F Park ... ctrl-W
posted by flabdablet at 10:27 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I can't pick just one, but a full quarter of Billy Bragg's early tunes will immediately take me back to that special place.
posted by vverse23 at 11:00 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Isn't nostalgia very specific to time and place and person? Bicep's Glueis a perfect slice of nostalgia for 90s UK rave, complete with a video featuring rave locations in all their run-down misery.

I would be nostalgic, but I missed most of 90s UK rave. I was too busy trying to survive living in the UK and getting myself sufficient qualifications to get myself out of the UK to New Zealand. Still, I'm heart-broken that so many people didn't have and would never have the option I had to fuck the fuck off to a life that's not so crushing. So I'll be sad about that instead.
posted by happyinmotion at 11:07 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]




Got to be “Ripple” and “Brokedown Palace.”
posted by ob1quixote at 11:40 PM on July 4, 2018 [4 favorites]


> Danny Boy. Not only are the lyrics nostalgic, but it makes everyone who listens nostalgic for a country they never even lived in.

Yes - and in the same category I'll add Dougie MacLean's "Caledonia" (that link is from a BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards show; another nice version.)

Also I feel like this recent AskMe is relevant: Songs inextricably tied to time and place
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 11:57 PM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


Not nostalgia, but I'm sometimes surprised at how much my feeling about a song changes.
Fast Car. Not my kind of thing. Never paid much attention to it, was tired of hearing it all the time when it came out. Until a year or so ago when I had to sit and listen to it, and then listened to it over and over and holy shit this is the saddest, most melancholy song in the world. I'm pretty sure I cried.

I've said it before, but I never understood nostalgia, didn't look back on things, fondly or otherwise, not in the intense way people talk about. Until my 50's. Then I started playing catch in a big way. I feel every bit of this article.
posted by bongo_x at 12:24 AM on July 5, 2018 [5 favorites]


Ooh, let's not forget the tragically hip. Man, there's a lot of songs in there. i mean Gord was a master at that. His style and ability to evoke, utterly unique.

Death cab for cutie I feel like the band gets paid in Nostalgia royalties. Have a listen to "Summer Skin", follow it up with DF Wallace's short story "Forever Overhead" and tell me those two haven't mastered the feeling of being a young person working the confused abstract boundaries of their physicality. And re DCfC, "brothers on a hotel bed" as well. And absolutely this little zone of my nostalgia was first inhabited by "nightswimming" too.

Listen to the prelude of Bach's English Suite in F major. Maybe by Gould. It is instrumental, of course, but that theme is so wistful, layering and going minor and coming back, moving higher, that it is somehow about remembering the past to me. And it turns out the shades of the past might be uglier, more dissonant, , so the original major theme comes around again, saying 'whatever you have remembered, is in itself a miracle.' (I have a really bad flu, so ya know.)
posted by sylvanshine at 12:29 AM on July 5, 2018


Oh rangefinder, for me, Caledonia is pure essence of the heady days before the independence referendum when it looked like it might actually happen.

And given everything that has happened since, that hurts.
posted by hfnuala at 12:46 AM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


Ed Sheeran, The Parting Glass
Eva Cassidy, Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World
From Transatlantic Sessions series 2 (1998), Nanci Griffith, with Maura O'Connell, Karen Matheson, James Grant - Who Knows Where The Time Goes
posted by TrishaU at 1:22 AM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


Interesting point about "Danny Boy" and Irish emigrant songs in general. My favorite example of this is "Spancil Hill," which is deliberately written with inaccurate detail, with literary intent. Now, I'm definitely not saying that Irish emigrant songs aren't nostalgic or that they have to be grounded in a real, experienced place and time in order for them to be nostalgic.

I think Spancil Hill is a more nostalgic song than Danny Boy specifically because it is constructed as a series of misrepresentations that the singer is speaking to themselves. Danny Boy is directed to a missing partner, or so it seems at first, until we understand there are or may have been two voices. Spancil Hill is about missing an unobtainable, even a non-existent place, and deliberately so constructed. It's admirable.

"The Town I Loved So Well" is hugely nostalgic, in part because it compares and contrasts a pre-war to a wartime first-person view of a specific hometown. At the same time, it expresses the viewpoint of a real person at the time and place it was written, and therefore can be argued to be the antithesis of nostalgia. Anyway, yeah, Irish tunes, good place to dig around on this topic.
posted by mwhybark at 2:12 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Parachutes
posted by snofoam at 2:22 AM on July 5, 2018


Danny Boy. Not only are the lyrics nostalgic, but it makes everyone who listens nostalgic for a country they never even lived in.

Then there's the reverse; "Letters from America" is the home country nostalgic for the people who left.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:15 AM on July 5, 2018


A few more, probably I’m alone in thinking of these (they are perhaps too obvious, but don’t care since they definitely evoke nostalgia in me):

Wasted Years, Iron Maiden

Never Say Goodbye, Bon Jovi

Dream On, Aerosmith

Radio Ga Ga, Queen
posted by kmartino at 4:23 AM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


Once in a Lifetime does this to me, and it also acknowledges our shared inability to hold on to anything.

I always thought it was generically nostalgic but now the middle age really settles down over me when I hear it.

I ask myself 'How did I get here?' like once a day.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 4:57 AM on July 5, 2018 [8 favorites]


I would be nostalgic, but I missed most of 90s UK rave.

I was listening on shuffle a while ago, and a piece of piano house came on which gave me such a wave of nostalgia for all those raves I didn’t go to and almost certainly would have hated. I’m not even sure how it ended up in my music library, but it was so evocative of a moment in time.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 5:00 AM on July 5, 2018


... quickly becoming a source post [see comments].
posted by filtergik at 5:12 AM on July 5, 2018


Fire and Rain.
posted by tzikeh at 8:04 PM on July 4


I opened this in another tab and started playing it while reading through this thread. My wife walked into the room and said "I have such a strong sense of nostalgia from this song".
posted by srboisvert at 5:52 AM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


In My Life, The Beatles
Time in Bottle, Jim Croce
Bookends, Simon & Garfunkel
posted by Caxton1476 at 6:18 AM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


Oh yeah...

The House That Built Me, Miranda Lambert
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here it's like I'm someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself.
If I could walk around I swear I'll leave.
Won't take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me.
posted by Caxton1476 at 6:31 AM on July 5, 2018


The Last Resort by the Eagles.
posted by yoga at 6:37 AM on July 5, 2018


Take the Long Way Home, Supertramp
Send in the Clowns, Stephen Sondheim (although I can't believe that one hasn't popped up yet)
Sister I'm a Poet, Morrissey
posted by lagomorphius at 6:41 AM on July 5, 2018


The Boys Of Summer and ends with The Boys Are Back In Town.
You can't start a mix with Boys of Summer. It's too slow and wistful to start a mix, but it'd be a good ender. Flows better anyways, chronologically, starting with The Boys are Back in town, because in the Boys of Summer, the boys are gone. Anyways, your filler tracks are, starting with the boys coming back to town, peaking joy and then increasing despair:
Where the Boys Are - Connie Francis
Girls and Boys - Blur
Boys Boys Boys Lady Gaga
Let's Hear it for the Boy - Denise Williams
Boy by Ra Ra Riot
Boys Better - Dandy Warhols
Last of the Famous International Playboys - Morrissey
Boys Don't Cry -The Cure
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:04 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Penny Lane, the Beatles
Night and Day, Cole Porter (it sounds nostalgic in many piano arrangements. Porter apparently wrote it about The Alcazar in Cleveland.)
Walk on the Ocean, Toad the Wet Sprocket
Bron-Yr-Aur, Led Zeppelin, and maybe Over the Hills and Far Away
Video Killed the Radio Star, Buggles
Allentown, Billy Joel
The Last Day of Summer, Kirsty MacColl
Halloween, Kirsty MacColl
I Love You, Goodbye, Thomas Dolby

Special Lloyd Cole category:

Pretty much the entire Love Story album
4 M.b.
Period Piece (if you are nostalgic for the Berlin Wall).
posted by lagomorphius at 7:42 AM on July 5, 2018


From the article:

What about modern classics like “California Stars” by Billy Bragg and Wilco

Surely Woody Guthrie should get some credit for writing the lyrics. It is a really good song, but I have never thought of it as 'modern' since the words were written before I was born.
posted by Quonab at 8:10 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


I suppose it depends on what you're nostalgic for. "Nostalgia" was also the original diagnosis for what would later be called "shell shock" and then "PTSD". It was thought of as a kind of homesickness, a longing to return to the past, a longing for what is now lost--often for a past that never truly existed, a loss that is inherently irrevocable. Nostalgia is therefore, in a sense, an unanswerable pain; you can learn to live with it, or learn to move beyond or through it into something else, but the actual wound itself will never heal. It can't.

There are some songs that I think intentionally evoke feelings of nostalgia, or at least where something inherent in the music or lyrics evoke such feelings, and other songs where I feel nostalgia when I listen to them because of my relationship to the song and the context given to it by my experiences.

That being said, here are some songs that I feel have some inherently nostalgic elements:

Skin and Bone, by Heartless Bastards
Hold Your Head High, by Heartless Bastards [Live]
I See a Darkness, by Johnny Cash [w/ Bonnie "Prince" Billy, who wrote the song]
Nobody's Baby Now, by Headless Heroes [better than Nick Cave's version, fight me]
Streets of Laredo, by Johnny Cash
As Long as the Grass Shall Grow, by Johnny Cash & June Carter [revised lyrics]
Acid Tongue, by Jenny Lewis
Born Secular, by Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins
Silence for You, by Mononoke
Illuminate, by Wildes
w/o u, by Gems
Jagwar, by SHELLS
Polly Come Home, by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
Blood Embrace, by Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Matt Sweeney
No More Workhorse Blues, by Palace Brothers

Heartless Bastards honestly could have been a list all their own. Erika Wennerstrom is one of the best American song writers working today, imo. I have a playlist of like 100 songs that's just music that makes me feel this way. It's also essentially the basis for Lana Del Rey's entire oeuvre.
posted by Fish Sauce at 8:55 AM on July 5, 2018


Brown Eyed Girl, obviously.
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:08 AM on July 5, 2018


The song "These Are Days" [SLYT] by 10,000 Manacis is basically just a very lovely-sounding statement that "I sure am going to miss today when it's gone."
These are days you'll remember
Never before and never since
I promise
Will the whole world be warm as this
And as you feel it
You'll know it's true
posted by wenestvedt at 9:14 AM on July 5, 2018 [4 favorites]


Brown Eyed Girl, obviously

It works for me on a couple of levels: my mom has alwsys been a Van Morrison fan, and that was the song perpetually playing in our house the first summer infant me was around. I had always had a fondness for it but it wasn’t really til twenty-some years later that I forged a personal connection with it: I got roped into a last-minute gig playing bass with a guitar player and a fiddler. I had played with the guitarist a few times, and he had played with the fiddler once, but said fiddle player and I had never even met.

The rehearsal, such as it was, was the 45-minute drive to the venue where we rosssd around song titles to see which ones we all knew with some degree of confidence and what key we were best to play it in. One of the songs was “Brown Eyed Girl” which of course I had heard a thousand times but never tried to play. I was pleased that I knocked it out if the park – even the bass break in the middle.

Personally though, nothing evokes a particular time and place like Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”: all the standard Gen-X associations (Breakfast Club, Live Aid), plus a particular chaste-but-hormonally-charged teenaged date with someone who made me tingle.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:56 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


June, by Spock's Beard. Wistful, beautiful harmonies, feels like one of those eternal summers from your youth. Makes my husband tear up.

Cigarettes, by King's X. "Is it June or late September? Is it 1993? Could you help me to remember? Is this how I'm supposed to be?"

Angel From Montgomery, by John Prine. A window into someone else's nostalgia.

Mother and Child Reunion, by Paul Simon. My first introduction to him as a solo artist was Negotiations and Love Songs (my dad had all the Simon and Garfunkel albums) which was given to me on a day when I was slouching around the house as a mopey teenager.
posted by PussKillian at 10:11 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


it makes everyone who listens nostalgic for a country they never even lived in.

Even the lyricist (an Englishman) never lived there.
posted by pracowity at 10:54 AM on July 5, 2018


She Moved Through the Fair -

My young love said to me,
My mother won't mind
And my father won't slight you
For your lack of kind.
She stepped away from me
And this she did say,
"It will not be long love
'Til our wedding day".

She stepped away from me
And she moved through the fair
And fondly I watched her move here
And move there.
And she went her way homeward
With one star awake,
As the swan in the evening
Moved over the lake.

Last night she came to me,
My young love came in.
So softly she entered,
That her feet made no din.
And she came close beside me
And this she did say,
"It will not be long love
'Til our wedding day".
posted by Jane the Brown at 12:21 PM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


For me, young Sinead O'Connor, who is only a few year older than me, is the essence of nostalgia.

Nostalgia for Ireland's beautiful music but also her honesty and bluntness about how fucked up it was.
posted by hfnuala at 1:06 PM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]




I will never stop being squicked out by hearing Steely Dan's "Hey, 19" in the grocery store.

Nostalgia is something I generally run from, and I think that fully-deployed song nostalgia has to come as a surprise, at least for me. Like I know that Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne" is going to play around Christmastime, and it nonetheless poleaxes me in the middle of a random aisle; it plugs straight into the physical memory port without filters, and then I feel them falling back into place as I realize that I've forgotten what I was reaching for, and that the slow person who's been ahead of me for the last three minutes is still standing there, and did I remember to feed the dog? I am snapped back into the present and that stab of memory is gone. I miss that fleeting sense of overwhelming feeling--when I am moved to seek it out, it is fragile, and easily spoiled by the dog chasing a cat through the kitchen, or a kid asking where the scissors are--but I also think of it as a potentially malignant spell that's been broken. I am outwardly annoyed, secretly relieved.
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:45 PM on July 5, 2018 [6 favorites]


For me, personally..

The Time to Remember, by Billy Joel Simply because these WILL be days to remember, that we can never recall.

I will Remember You, by Sarah McLachlan This one, popped into my sleeping head while I was in the hospital with my ex husband, who was losing his cancer battle. It came on as if someone turned on the radio - waking me up and bringing me closer to him just half an hour before his last breath. Lots of nostalgia with this song, for what might have been and what was.

Summer Breeze by Seals and Crofts. I was a kid in NJ, on a hot summer night, riding home from Asbury Park and the boardwalk it used to be, lying in the back of the VW Bus, atop the engine. Looking out at the stars as we drove home. Lots of hard times happened shortly after this, but it brings me back to good days.
posted by annieb at 3:45 PM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


Highway Patrol Man? No.
posted by PHINC at 4:34 PM on July 5, 2018


Moon over Marin always struck me as nostalgic for the present
posted by eustatic at 5:47 PM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Nothing for Fisherman’s Blues by The Waterboys? Consider me surprised...
posted by dmt at 6:06 PM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]




Thought of another one that is at or near the top of the list: the album version of “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:36 PM on July 5, 2018


Nostalgic, but not the most nostalgic:
Do You Remember These? by the Statler Bros
posted by Rash at 7:58 PM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Van Morrison’s On Hyndford Street (the version from Hymns to the Silence) pretty much defines nostalgia for me. On that album, it’s followed by the hymn, Be Thou My Vision. And for me, Hyndford Street never feels complete without also playing Van’s version of BTMV. That’s been one of my very favorite combos for decades. At my father’s funeral, the minister introduced the final hymn by mentioning that it was my father’s favorite and that he asked to have it played at the service. He’d never mentioned it to me, so when the strains of BTMV (albeit not Van’s, but a different, churchier version) began to play, it was a slightly startling but welcome, comforting and bittersweet moment.
posted by marsha56 at 9:57 PM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


In the Living Years, Mike and the Mechanics

Right Here Right Now, Jesus Jones

Winds of Change, Scorpions

Rolling in the Deep, Adele
posted by kmartino at 4:05 AM on July 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


In late, but NOSTALGIA?

Summer Wages
posted by mikelieman at 4:46 AM on July 6, 2018




Strauss' 4 Last Songs - each and all of them - seem to be the essence of nostalgia. Written by a man in his 80s in post-war Germany.
Songs that make for personal nostalgic wallowing can be embarrassingly bad - trashy Italian pop from the time I lived there is the most egregious (look up 'Richi e Poveri' on YouTube if you dare)
posted by TwelveNoteRow at 8:43 AM on July 6, 2018


Half past France by John Cale

Summer Wind by Sinatra

What'll I Do by the McGarrigles and Wainwrights

Do I Ever Cross Your Mind? Dolly Parton
posted by bonobothegreat at 2:35 PM on July 6, 2018


TheWhiteSkull: "Warren Zevon is the edgy Jimmy Buffet.

There- I said it.
"

You can say it, but that doesn't make it true.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:03 PM on July 10, 2018


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