Train Nostalgia

I saw Train earlier this month, one of those really great concerts you know you’ll probably like but you actually end up LOVING. It was an outdoor concert in a rather intimate setting, meaning we were a small audience. But we were enthusiastic and excited, and the band couldn’t have been lovelier. I guess what surprised me most was how much hearing those songs brought me back. Chalk one more up for nostalgia.

My reaction caused me to actually look up the years when their most popular songs were released, and for their first two, I was in high school. As if there could be any more formative time. And it’s like I was transported back to those teenage years, listening to those songs on the radio, singing along, and really FEELING the lyrics. I guess it’s the same way I felt hearing them live, more than twenty-five years later. Pretty incredible that music can do that.

And as much as I believe in the transportive powers of books, it doesn’t really work the same way. Re-reading books from my past or youth doesn’t necessarily put me back into the feelings of the circumstances I was in at those times. It’s more that it takes me back to the way I pictured the book in my mind as I read. I think of The Giver, which I first read in junior high, and which was epically magic when I read it all those years ago. There had truly been nothing like it. To the point that I can still picture the way I imagined the characters and story in my mind. Hearing Train’s “Meet Virginia” now, however, does recreate the actual feelings from the time when I first heard it.

I was in the middle of a work trip for this concert, and I rented a car the next day to get me from one work event to the next, and I’m sure there were drops of Jupiter in my hair as I drove through the desert listening to Train’s greatest hits. Give them a listen and see if it doesn’t just bring you back a couple decades. We all need such a journey from time to time.