This is how it works.

Driving with my dad when I was little, a song he liked would pop up on the radio and he'd tell me exactly how old he was when he bought the album that it was on. I used to think this was just part of his genius and while I still maintain that he's by far the most smartest, the same thing happens to me. And if it happens to both of us, then it must happen to everyone, at least once they get to be old enough to actually have some sense of value and reverence for the passage of time.

What's funny is how random it is, and how you can't make a conscious effort to associate music with any one particular thing. It just happens. Par example, I can't hear 'Toxic' without immediately thinking of pastel jellybeans in 2004, and that Regina Spektor song about the radio reminds me of Halloween last year and what I now recognize to be an uncomplicated, naive sense of possibility, and I usually don't even know about cool bands but Liz made me a CD that had some Modest Mouse song about a dashboard melting and that only reminds me of driving to work through Beverly Hills last year while wondering how the hell I wound up there.

All still apply.