Music on a Memory Trip

When I was fourteen, a friend and I created a music duo called Jenanella.

Over the next few years, we spent the majority of our time bent over our guitars, songbooks overflowing with words, carefully crafting melody lines and harmonies. We wrote in fields, at festivals, by lakes, in attic rooms, in school - wherever we had each other, we were creating music.

We recorded an album, performed both supporting and headline sets, with our biggest gig on the main stage of Solfest.

And then, just like that, with the end of school, we went our separate ways.

More than fifteen years later, we met again at my parents' wedding. Jen mentioned that she wouldn't be able to remember any of the songs, but I, knowing how music supports the formation of memories, said we should give it a go anyway.

We met in the evening, kids asleep, Jen armed with the guitar and only the titles of the songs.

I found that I could not remember a single note, or any of the words. Jen would be singing her part and I had to trust that as soon as the moment came for me to sing, that my body would remember it.

It did.

What an extraordinary experience of singing a melody, without any idea of what would happen in the next second, but feeling my body and my voice flow before my mind and my memory had caught up.

And I also found that as my body remembered, I began to have visual glimpses of places we had sung, imagery of made-up worlds as I had imagined them while writing, flickers of composing in a field under the stars.

I remembered in real-time why we made the creative choices we did, why a harmony was different here, the disagreement we had over the music there, how my voice always struggled over the notes at this point, the ghost lines of friends singing harmonies along with us around a campfire.

It was a mind-blowing evening of traveling back in time through our own music, like a beautiful dream sequence in a film.

I mean, I'm a composer. I preach this stuff. 

Striking music matched with film or words will create strong and lasting memories for your audience.

But to experience it like this was something else and a gift that I never could have imagined receiving.

This is the power of music. 

If you would like to talk to me about how we can bring music to your project in order to create lasting memories for your audience, book a call with me.

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