Music and nostalgia

For the Bear Blog Carnival James ask us to write about music memories. I recently wrote about how my kids playing music affect me, but this will be on the effect from nostalgia musical memories can have. I think the scientific term is Music-evoked autobiographical memory. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and for me, specific pieces of music attached to memories decades ago are something that really can pull on my emotional strings. A 90s pop song can be almost devastating - not the song itself as such, but how it subconsciously puts me back to simpler, safer and more carefree times, in contrast to the present world that can seem closer to pre-apocalyptic. If I get misty-eyed to a movie it is almost always in combination with some sort of musical cue, and just listening to the soundtrack alone can be enough. It can be the death of Boromir, the ending of Con Air or La Marseillaise in Casablanca. Like for many people, my musical taste has been more or less locked into what I got into in my…