Songs and the Sensory Snapshot

Music of the right time and the right place

I sit in my car at the traffic light and the silent, soft tears fall. Joy but not elation. Remembrance but not nostalgia. Something in between. Something visceral and honest.

On an errand run, I am listening to Souvenirs by Dan Fogelberg. The entire album. Every song, sometimes twice. Each time louder, filling the car with his expressive voice and that gorgeous guitar.

Judge me as you will.

Fogelberg’s music has been linked by the misinformed and the music snobs to themes that some deem overly sentimentalized. Sweetness runs off of his songs like syrup off pancakes, some might say. But these are the reviews of the listeners who have only heard “The Leader of the Band” a hundred times over. Ask rocker Joe Walsh, ask Jim James, the frontman for My Morning Jacket, ask Garth Brooks, Zac Brown—all who claim Fogelberg was highly influential in their musical lives.

But I’m not here to defend Fogelberg’s legacy. There’s no need to. I’m here to understand why music of a certain time and place in a life and in the life of that music sears so deeply.

It’s not nostalgia, some wistful longing for the past. There is no urge to revisit my 20 year old self in a dark dorm room sitting on the floor with my old acoustic guitar in my lap, blasting Fogelberg’s “As the Raven Flies” on a wonky record player and trying to learn every chord and every word. Fun to think about, sure. But I have no ache to return to those days.

Still, as the traffic light changes and my car lurches forward, I sing along with “Song from Half Mountain.” I go back to the playlist’s beginning and find “Better Change” and turn it up loud, belting out, I can see you in the distance! The tone of Fogelberg’s voice, the deep resonance and guttural, sincere vibrations of his pure poetic phrasing roll over me.

I revered Bob Dylan, the Stones, and the Beatles, wearing the groove out of the White Album as a young teen. The depth of songwriters like Stephen Stills, (Listen to “Helplessly Hoping,” “So Begins the Task,” or “Word Game.”) have carried me through the curving roads of my life. Today it’s Sam Beam of Iron and Wine and Jason Isbell. But Fogelberg was there when my young mind was finding its rhythms. I was the teen with the tattered copy of On the Road and Siddhartha in my backpack, a hippie born a little too late to truly identify with them, but fully aware enough to admire their heroes.

And then I listened to Souvenirs.

I read the liner notes and was knocked out by the friends Fogelberg had found, the great musicians who performed on the album and the industry stalwarts who believed in him—Graham Nash, Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Russ Kunkel, and on and on. His manager was the legendary Irving Azoff; the photography was from the great Henry Diltz. He was right there with Jackson Browne, Poco, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The album came to me like a hurricane. Soon afterward I bought his first album, Home Free, one that was rather obscure until Souvenirs made the charts. Then came others that were equally if not more impactful—Captured Angel, Phoenix, The Innocent Age, an album where Joni Mitchell sings backup vocals and the title track is dedicated to Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay). That album might be the one that resonates more than any, as it’s a meditation on the questions and the wisdom one discovers in life’s journey, what every young man undoubtedly faces in those coming of age years—the more we know, the less we know, and as Fogelberg sings on “Lost in the Sun”—I always knew the the truths lay just beneath the lies.

A recent psychological study on why we feel so strongly when hearing music categorized the listeners in two groups—feeling sad or feeling awe. That’s a bit too simplistic, I think. Human emotion is far more complicated. But still, I believe the study is on to something. Awe is what triggered the tears for me. I wasn’t sad, I was both amazed and full of wonder. And because every song on that album first came to me at the right time and at the right place in my young life, they were forever branded in my psyche. In so many ways, I am grateful for that.

Inside my house after returning home, I pick up my guitar and fumble through a few chords. In seconds, like a kind of magic, I rediscover every note of Fogelberg’s “Old Tennessee,” I song I haven’t tried to play in more than twenty years. But there it is. I stumble over a lyric or two, but quickly find again those lovely words, lost little memories that could only be resurrected by a long drive and good cry.