There’s nothing like a few solid hours of drive time through some wide-open country with a big, beautiful sky filling your windshield to set your life in perspective. I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days on the road—just me, my dog, Frankie, and Spotify over the Bluetooth in the car. It was glorious.

With the tires humming on the blacktop as a random mix of my downloaded music cranked through the vehicle, I wasn’t just driving my car down the highway, I was traveling in my own private time machine.

Two things bring me the strongest associations with memory: smells, and music. In the sweet space of a few bars (the kind with notes, not Captain Morgan) I can

be magically transported to a whole other time and life.

Michael Martin Murphy’s Wildfire immediately puts me in a tractor pulling a rod-weeder over a field in summer fallow. It’s mostly a bygone practice now—leaving a field fallow for a season. They just use chemicals for everything now.

Let me hear the words “my immaculate dream” from Come Undone and I’m fifteen again, bouncing over the rural roads of western Maryland in a school bus, on my way to a high school from which I will graduate the following year (a full year early) so I can return to Nebraska and try to reclaim the life I was torn from at thirteen.

I will go back, listening to Bruce’s Glory Days, and Hungry Like a Wolf by Duran Du ran, but there will be nothing of that former life to reclaim, as I discover the girl I had been is long gone.

My very awful stint of being flat broke, in college, and lost beyond all reckoning (though one noble professor tried his best) is perfectly resurrected by Mr. Mister’s Broken Wings. It’s still hard to listen to that one all the way through, even today.

The beautiful voice of Beatriz Adriana takes me back to the little Spanish style casita on Olive Street in Ventura, California where my marriage began and our first child was born. I can see, with perfect clarity, the cracks in the linoleum floor of the kitchen I swept daily, and smell the wild anise growing on the hillside at the end of the street as Beatriz croons out Sigue Sin Mi—making my guts want to bleed in the remembering…how sweet life was, who I had been then, and all that’s come and gone since.

The happy chaos of family gatherings, holidays, and drama like only Hispanic inlaws know how to unleash is so vividly revived when I hear anything by Los Bukis or early Shakira.

More recently it’s been Leonard Cohen, Colter Wall, Lana Del Rey, Imagine Dragons, Lauren Daigle, and the old stuff of Willie, Waylon, Johnny and Merle that have buoyed me along.

What an immeasurable gift music brings to our lives, and how fabulous that our technology makes it so amazingly accessible. It’s always good to stay up with the new stuff; new artists are born and discovered every day. But we mustn’t forget the value in checking back with those old tunes that carried us through—when you knew that guy, and really believed you were destined to be together forever; or when you took that trip—the one that changed the course of your life; and when you laughed with her that time, over that one thing, until both of you were crying and trying not to pee—just before she got the diagnosis.

It’s a brief journey, really—much shorter for some than others. Time is precious. Every way that we can we need to try to stay in tune with that fact.