listened to a favorite album from 1983 the other day that gave me the profoundest joy. I danced around my kitchen singing along to every word. My whole body felt happy.
The album is by the rock singer and songwriter Marshall Crenshaw. Everything I love in rock is there—melodies that ingratiate, beats that elevate, and a voice ingrained with regret for love gone astray. “Do you remember the promise I gave you? The one I swore I would hold to?” he sings in the song “Our Town.
” “Well, you’re there, I’m here, and everything I said was wrong.” The whole album is just perfect. I hadn’t listened to in 25 years.
And what I was feeling wasn’t nostalgia—longing for better days gone by. That’s because of Crenshaw’s natural elan as a songwriter. transcends the pop culture of the ’80s.
Every note sounded as fresh as if it was written today. It’s also because better days are a myth. Our brains never see the past clearly.
They are like painters who are never satisfied. They constantly retouch the past with the colors of the present, putting a fresh version of ourselves on display for us to ponder. Turns out memory is a castle made of sand.
That’s unsettling, no? That’s one of the captivating insights in 2023’s by Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. Memories are not a true or false picture of the past; they are a Monet lily pond. “Most paintings typically include some mixture of details t.