cover.jpg…is the title of a newly released book by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. This morning I read an article on Salon about the book which described why music is a critical step in human evolution and why the songs we loved as teens remain stuck on “play” in our heads.

I was thinking about this a lot yesterday, as I ran/walked in Redwood Park, tripping out on my iPod. I have about 800 songs on there now, many of them from periods of my life that have long passed. I set the player to “shuffle” and it’s like the greatest radio station of all time, pulling out songs that transport me instantly, to 1975 or 1986 or 1968, and suddenly, I am there, and an entire scene from my life is kind of superimposed over the dusty path and the redwoods. I could write an entire essay from every one of those eight hundred songs.

But here are a few snippets from yesterday’s walk, from songs that just randomly entered my brain and took me into another realm.

We all have music like this, music that burns into the soul when we’re young and remains essential for the rest of time.

album_cover_sm.jpg“Baking” by Aztec-Two Step. College years. Ithaca, New York. Totally happy song. I had a boyfriend who played acoustic guitar and he played this one a lot. It made me feel young and bouncy. Running in the grass at Stewart Park at the edge of Cayuga Lake. You do the baking and I’ll do the making/How our lives will fly, yes you do the baking and I’ll do the making, singing, spinning together our lives away/our lives away….

b000009ddm01_aa240_sclzzzzzzz_.jpg“A Town Called Paradise” by Van Morrison. 1986, the summer I met J. (or actually re-met him, but that’s a different story). He had a little beige Alfa Romeo Spider and we would drive around with the top down and heater and the music blasting, up Mount Tam, all around. It reminds me of being in that fast little car but also the little A-framed cabin he (and then we) lived in. We played a lot of this at our wedding in 1988, too. It doesn’t matter what they say/doesn’t matter what they do/all that matters is/my relationship to you. I’ll take you out/put you in my car/we’ll go for a long long ride/we’re going down to a town called Paradise.

b00001o2ua01_aa240_sclzzzzzzz_v65985765_.jpg“Amie” by Pure Prairie League. High School. Nothing beat belting out this song while driving on the Garden State Parkway, tossing quarters into the toll baskets. It’s funny, they’re almost identical sounding, but the PPL version is pure high school, while the Counting Crows version reminds me totally of my husband, since he is the one who turned me onto Counting Crows.

cover_45221917112005.jpg“Waking the Witch” from Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love album. 1985. A tough year. This song is so bizarre, dreamlike, (almost nightmarish) haunting. Voices from left, right, up and down, whispering, taunting, “Wake up.” It always races my heart, makes me feel slightly anxious, but alive.

This is obvious — that music elicits emotion better than speech is something we all understand. It’s why movies have soundtracks, and it’s why couples have favorite songs. “You gotta hear this,” Natalie Portman tells Zach Braff in “Garden State,” playing him the fine Shins’ song “New Slang.” “It’ll change your life.” The scene is more touching than gushy because, of course, it’s true: it’s not always the Shins, but music does change your life. At the end, they fall in love.

I love that scene, and I instantly loved that song by the Shins, and I recognized it immediately. I have been intensely connected through music via almost every relationship I’ve been in, but since I’ve been married now for almost 18 years, it’s a long soundtrack we’ve been developing over time.

I think that iTunes and iPods are the greatest invention of this century. They’re miraculous, really, little time-travel machines, bringing me back to places and memories that I otherwise would have lost. And it was so great to have the neuroscientist confirm what I’ve known all along; that music really DOES do something amazing to our brains, and to our whole lives.