[Crossposted at my new place of residence, spynotes.wordpress.com.]

Yesterday afternoon, after kissing AJ goodbye in front of his school and watching him run to the kindergarten line, I plugged into my iPod. As "Snow" by The Red Hot Chili Peppers cycled up and I stepped off the curb, the leaves seemed a little greener and the sun a little brighter and I thought, "My iPod has changed my life."

It's an addiction really. But it goes back to childhood at least. I have a need to combine music and movement. Maybe it's because I started ballet classes at three. Maybe it's why I started ballet classes at three. Maybe it's a basic human need. Or maybe it's just my need. But I am happiest when music and movement are synchronized. It's why conducting is my great love. It's why I will always, in my mind, be a dancer manqué, even though the hours I logged in ballet school more than twenty years ago are now pretty irrelevant.

The greatest marker of the change is this:

Before: Running=Loathing
After: Running=Addiction

Why? Because running has a soundtrack, one that takes me places, one that moves me or inspires me to move.

How? That's the puzzling question. It's not surprising that my recent scholarly interests have drawn me to film music. I have always been intrigued by the way in which music affects people and changes the way they do things and what things they do. Film is a great place to look at the phenomenon because music in film is designed and deployed in order to effect change on the audience, to direct and control their emotions, to allow them to get inside the message of the film, whether it be a B-grade horror flick or a Palme d'Or winning art film. I'm curious about the film process. Sometimes there are simple metaphors at work. Jazz, for example, was often used in early Hollywood films to represent racial anxiety or a more general anxiety of the defiance of social convention. But often it seems to be something more ephemeral.

I was confronted with this again last night because of a strange juxtaposition that made me think about the uncontrolled nature of the control of a soundtrack. When I got home from my afternoon walk, while I was working, I was listening to a Sufjan Stevens channel on Last.fm and a song by Frou Frou called "Let Go" caught my attention. I liked its orchestration and its atmospherics. I liked the lyrics. "There's beauty in the breakdown." I went over to iTunes and indulged in some instant gratification shopping.

Then yesterday evening, when I sacked out in front of the TV in a state of post-yogic exhaustion, I stumbled on Garden State and found myself sucked in. And the same Frou Frou song played over the closing credits. In this case, I brought my associations with the song from hearing it while I was working, of listening to the lyrics in isolation of the film, into my reading of the meaning of the song against the film. It helped me identify with the film because my personal association with the song made me feel like the film was for me. Had I heard the song first in the film, I would still have reacted to it, but rehearings of the song would conjure up the film instead of the other way around. The song instead becomes a walking advertisement for the film.

Now I'm not the optimal example for this phenomenon and I have no idea if the song was released before or after the film. But I'm guessing this difference in audience-song association is part of why so many contemporary films use a mix of old and new songs. (It's probably also why live concert tours for new albums mix old and new songs -- to remind audiences that they identify with the band personally and take them somewhere new).

As I write this, Dave Grusin's "Mountain Dance," has cycled onto my iTunes player. This is a song I downloaded specifically to think about this issue. Vaguely jazzy piano scores like Grusin's score for Falling in Love, the abysmally bad film with two great actors (Meryl Streep and Robert de Niro) have always made me think of the peculiar mix of freedom and sadness of leaving home and also New York. Which means it takes me to my high school days in Connecticut and the times I boarded the train for The City, as it was always called in the suburbs, without my parents (and usually without their knowledge) to find my own way. This is very lightweight and fairly utilitarian music -- it's not something I would even listen to if it had no associations for me, but it still has an effect. It's not about quality. It's about the power of suggestion. And in this case, it's an association with films from my teen years when the grownups were still behaving in a more grown up way than me. It was part of the great escape to adulthood, with all its mistakes and exhilarations and dramas.

In the process of archiving old posts, I've started looking at all the music I've written about over the years and have begun considering the idea of putting together a soundtrack of my own. I already make playlists labeled by mood or activity ("running" "happybusy," "jolielaide" and "water aerobics 3" are just a few currently taking up space on my hard drive). I've seen memes -- I've probably done memes like this -- where you are supposed to pick a song for each year of your life or for major events. These tend to be based on lyric meaning and is not what I mean. Instead I'm interested in what music will conjure up my past for myself. And for that matter, what conjures up your past for you?

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