All Songs Are Always Happy Memories

I was just sitting around today, minding my own business. For no good reason, a song entered my brain. It was by Fleetwood Mac. That “listen to the wind blow” one, called ‘The Chain’. I haven’t heard this song in forever — upwards of 10 years if we’re counting only active listens — but that’s how these things work. It happens all the time: some stupid song, like an annoying repressed memory, pops up out of nowhere and ruins your day. Before going any further, I must declare that I am absolutely not a fan of Fleetwood Mac, largely because their name sounds like a honky-tonk, cowboy-hat-wearing country music icon’s third album, but for other banal reasons too.

So I hit up my old friend YouTube, and tumbled down a mini YouTube and Google spiral. I remember I was first introduced to this song when I was in my second year of college, listening to an altogether different song called ‘Wind Blow’ by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, which used to play all the time on the radio — Hit 95 — as I’d drive my mum’s rickety old car to college every morning (which I’d bullied her into letting me use after I tried taking the bus, jumped out of a moving one because I’d gotten on to the wrong bus, reached home a bloody mess, and swore off buses forever).

To recycle one of the oldest themes around music, and also one of its most beautiful attributes: when you hear a song after a long time, you’re immediately transported back to the time you first heard that song. You remember everything with a shocking level of clarity: where you were, what you were doing, even the way that piece of music made you feel that very first time. Songs are always happy memories, even when they’re associated with truly horrifying things. (It’s often the same thing with smells.)

Anyway, so the Bone Thugs song sampled ‘The Chain’, taking its catchy guitar melody and its memorably defiant chorus, and made it even grander in its treatment. I hit up YouTube to listen to it, and I did — a few thousand times. And then I played the original Fleetwood Mac version, which I listened to a few thousand times as well.

Then I googled Fleetwood Mac — that’s when something strange began to happen. Like a system restore of sorts. With every link I clicked, with every photo I looked at, a new piece of a puzzle I’d already solved began to emerge. It seemed to me, very suspiciously, like I knew literally everything I was reading about Fleetwood Mac, including the names of its members and what they looked like 45 years ago or whatever.

Was it déjà vu? I doubt it, since, from what I remember, déjà vu is a momentary feeling where one eye sees the thing a little before the other one does, and so when the second eye sees it, the brain has already registered the first viewing as fact — or something weird like that, like a computer virus. This was no momentary emotion — my feelings appeared to me bit by bit over several minutes; a reluctant recovery of long forgotten memories.

So it leaves a couple of options, neither of which is particularly appealing to me right now. One is that I have always had some kind of latent spiritual connection with Fleetwood Mac and I activated those pathways by accident today. That I knew nothing about Fleetwood Mac, but once I read about them, I realised that I’d known them all my life and theirs. This is worrying to me because, for starters, I don’t believe in spirituality. It’s not a real thing. And on the next to impossible possibility that I may be wrong, Fleetwood Mac? Couldn’t my supposed spirit have picked someone better? And worse, where does it end? Do I also share a connection with, like, Father John Misty? Jimmy Page? Anupam Kher?

The other option is that I have somehow managed to completely erase from my brain mid-sized passages of my life spent reading about and listening to Fleetwood Mac. That’s just weird and mildly unsettling.