Sometimes before you smile you got to cry. You need a heart that’s filled with music, if you use it you can fly.

Music is an amazing thing. I think other than scent (which is a whole other post in and of itself) it is something that can take you back to specific moments in time and re-capture them over and over again. I have my ipod on shuffle (the only way I ever listen to it really) and all of the sudden what should come on, but Second Chance by .38 Special. This song will always and forever remind me of my Grandmother. HoHo. (long story why I called her HoHo, until the day she died, when I was in my 20’s). The summer that that song was popular I was spending the summer with at my father’s house. Which meant that I spent the summer at camp. I was 15 or 16. Camp was cool. HoHo drove me and picked me up every day. And this song was getting a lot of radio play and thus it was frequently on. And so it makes me thing of her. It also makes me think of the boy I had a HUGE crush on that summer – Alex. Alex was a counselor – and although I was in the CIT program, I was technically a camper and thus it was forbidden that we “date” .. he was only like 2 years older than me however .. but he also had a girlfriend. But it makes me think of him too.

Obviously other songs do this as well, I know I’ve shared here that I have distinct memories of sitting in my parents pinto station wagon listening to Hotel California on 8-track (yes, I’m old).

The Goo Goo Dolls Slide will always remind me of an ex-boyfriend ... again, at the time the song first came out he and I were dating long-distance and the line "I want to wake up where you are" held a lot of meaning for both of us. I was channel surfing in the car the other day (Clayton wasn't with me, otherwise we'd have been listning to kids music) and it came on, and I caught myself thinking about him. I've been thinking about him a lot lately, but again, that's a whole other post.

Not all songs have memories attached to them, but when I hear ones that do, they always eventually make me smile.