Songs that take you places in your mind

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mine are:
True Colors (phil collins version): It's need, bright sunny but cool day. i'm walking through a trail of heavy light green shrubbery, to an open clearing (like a meadow). it's either lightly raining or just finished and i can smell the woods around me. And with the bagpipe sound, i'm definitely somewhere in the uk.

Smooth Operator: It's dusk and i'm watching an urban/desert like town begin it's night life. the palm trees are swaying and bouncing to the groove. the scene is heavy with a filtered tent of terra cotta that makes everything strangely seductive and bluesy. The whole town lives on the heartbeat of that song.

Toto songs are crazy because their videos capture exactly what i feel from the songs. Africa, I'll be Over You....
but i first listened to their essential hits while playing lego Jurassic part (lost world level) and i just cried!!

Some choir songs bring me back to Special church events back in the 1990's and the excitement of getting ready and seeing my favorite local singers.

usually when i see a songs music video, it ruins my own mental setting for the song.

Certain cds like oleta adams and a group called virtue, i used to play tomb raider to (ps1) in my late mom's room. and we'd just laugh and talk. i miss her

I don't think in pictures but I have synaesthesia which makes every song have a shape, colour, and motion.
Some of them remind me of places where I heard them and I get the sensory flashback even though it's not very visual.

True Colours - I heard it driving off the 5 to Fullerton in 1986. I can still feel / smell the morning air and the hint of humidity starting to rise. I feel like there were orange blossom trees or someone was wearing an orange scent. I remember thinking I was supposed to like California and I was supposed to be having fun, but I wasn't. I didn't feel sad but I was very aware of the disconnect between how I felt and how I was supposed to feel.

You Shouldn't Be Sad by The Kinks transports me back to 1965 London complete with Routemasters.

True story that I've likely shared before.

In the summer of 1981 my family went on my grandfather's cabin cruiser boat for a two week holiday around the Thousand Islands. My brother and I had packed a lot of cassette tapes to play on our portable "ghetto blaster" (sorry if that term isn't PC.) Unfortunately, we forgot the box of cassettes in our car at the launch. All we had was the tape that was already in our cassette player, which had just two songs taped from the radio.

We listened to these two songs over and over for the entire two weeks since there wasn't a decent radio signal.


Over the Hills and Far Away (Zeppelin):




Picture the sensation of a boat pushing through rolling waves, at the acoustic beginning. There's a definite up-down thumping pattern in the guitar which matched the rhythm of our boat hitting the waves. The electric part reminds me of the choppier waves and the spray of water against my sunburn, when we accelerated.

The weather was beautiful with a bit of haze and some overcast skies. We camped at several of the islands including one called Ram Island.


You'll likely wanna skip the audio here ^ . Sorry, I'm just trying to give a visual.
Ram Island was totally undeveloped, with wild horses and wild rams.
My mother was terrified because there was a thunderstorm and she thought the animals might attack.




Iron Man (Sabbath)

This was the second song on our only cassette.
We played it when the boat was going fast against big waves.
You can hear the wave rhythm in this song, I think. I know I can.

This takes me back to technical college in Fleetwood when I used to cycle down to the sea front and watch the waves:

This song takes me back to my previous life:

on the german theme,

reminds of the trips we made from north netherlands to switzerland, mid 70s
the colonnes of american army vehicles to pass/(double?) on the autobahn