Hitting rewind isn’t always the answer
Don’t give up on old favourites, but do let the soundtrack to your life evolve.
A few nights ago, I was feeling a little sad, so I decided to delve into YouTube and find video clips of songs I’d enjoyed in my teens and early twenties.
That’ll cheer me up, I thought. And hearing tunes by the likes of Joe Jackson, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello and Dave Edmunds did bring a smile to my face.
Music certainly has curative powers, but when nostalgia kicks in, it can also be a mixed bag of feelings. Every heartbreak as well as every joy is laid bare in those songs.
And it occurred to me that the idea of a “soundtrack to your life” is very real — but you can vary the playlist as you go along.
Those old songs bring back memories of posters on the bedroom wall, cassettes playing at full blast in my old Corolla, and friendships that felt permanent but have since faded away.
A three-minute track can resurrect an entire emotional ecosystem: who you were trying to impress, what you were afraid of, how much you believed tomorrow would magically sort itself out.
The danger of nostalgia is that it edits ruthlessly. It trims out the boredom, the anxiety and the long stretches of uncertainty, and leaves behind a highlight reel.
You remember the intensity, not the confusion. You remember the romance, not the rent. And before you know it, the present feels flatter by comparison, like it’s failing some kind of audition to match up to a golden past.
But music also tells a more honest story if you let it. Those songs only mattered because they met you where you were at the time. They didn’t work magic on their own; they resonated because you were in the moment and paying attention.
That capacity to connect doesn’t vanish as you get older; it just gets buried under routines, responsibilities and the mistaken belief that emotional peak experiences belong exclusively to the young.
Changing the playlist isn’t about abandoning the past or pretending you’re someone else. It’s about recognising that you’re still evolving.
There are songs now that speak to patience rather than urgency, to acceptance rather than longing. They may not hit as hard on first listen, but they linger longer. They grow on you, the way hard-won wisdom does.
There’s something quietly powerful about discovering a new favourite song later in life and realising it matters just as much as the old ones, only in in a different way.
It speaks to you about knowing yourself a little better; of no longer needing the volume turned up to eleven just to feel alive.
Yes, revisit the old favourites when you need to. Let them remind you of where you’ve been and what you’ve survived. Then keep listening.
The music hasn’t stopped; the playlist is always getting longer.
If you like this, you can buy me a coffee.