Origins and remembering of memories

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I recently read a book called 'Shotgun Lovesongs' by Nickolas Butler. 

It's a new release, set in a small American farming town called Little Wing. It's about memories and reunions, how things change, or don't for some people. And running parallel and subtly to the main story is a story about how music plays a part in all of that.

Anyway I just can't stop thinking about the book. I finished it about 3 weeks ago but I can't stand to start another book yet because it was so good. It's given me so much material for artwork but it's just such a good book I don't want to do it a dis-service. So i've been pondering music and 'remembering' (and researching art residencies in Wisconsin, where the book is set!) to try and extract something perfect to make some art about, but I think i'd better just go for it at some point. 

Above are a few sketches and scans based on (of course) Home and Away (relevance to Shotgun Lovesongs = smalltown life/closeknit community/towns steeped in personal histories), but also just song lyrics that seemed to fit my mind when I was thinking about Shotgun Lovesongs and the mood of nostalgia (horrible but appropriate word meaning retrospectively happy and sad simultaneously!) and vicarious wishing that the book inspires! I actually got a bit upset after I finished it, because it wasn't real and i wasn't really there!

I've got lots of imagery on the back-burner, but here are some words first that i've gathered about memories/music etc.

'A slow song came over the jukebox, and there was a moment then when time congealed, when the fabric of things was as it had always been and continued to be for those others in attendance, but between us, a kind of fault separated itself noiselessly like a small mass of land breaking away and going into the ocean.'  - Shotgun Lovesongs

'Examples of some imagined (b) ones would be: sweaty teens in shiny pastels dancing in unison at a wood-paneled, tinsel-covered community-center room to "Snowqueen of Texas" by the Mamas and the Papas; a view from the side of a guy walking down a school hallway to Frank Ocean's "Forrest Gump," passing lockers painted in the 1970s and a ton of muted, rowdy students; a girl submerging her head into a tub of red hair dye to the chorus of St. Vincent's "Cheerleader."' - Tavi Gevinson on her blog Style Rookie

 'I felt like I wanted you to rewind and run home and sit under the bleachers at your real school dance so much. I didn’t want you to have to sit next to the people who have the serious faces.' - Leith Clark of Lula Magazine

'See I was playing a show down the road when your spirit left your body... But I still know the songs and the words and the name and the reasons.' - The Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound

"And the future hangs over our heads, and it moves with each current event, until it falls all around like a cold steady rain, if you love something give it away" - Bright Eyes - Land Locked Blues

You can never quite grasp your memories whole and perfectly and originally.

It’s like standing on the edge of a field in twilight or sunset and wondering what medium would be best to capture this scene. But then you realise you just can’t ever capture it, and that even if you came out here every night and stared and stared and tried and tried to remember it perfectly, you never would. You’d have to keep coming back to try and experience it again like you did the first time. Every now and again you feel you’ve grasped it and secured it maybe just long enough to think with it, but then it is swept softly/ripped violently away from you again, harder and harder to retrieve each time. This just increases your yearning for it, but you know you have to be patient; forcing a memory might warp it, or bring about other thoughts (relevant but not original) to fill the void; and they’re not what you want because they weren’t what you thought originally; they weren’t the origin of your memory.

I first recognised that remembering was actually a task, and one that should be taken seriously, on a bus ride from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik while listening to Land Locked Blues by Bright Eyes; sometimes songs crystalise your thoughts perfectly, or help you remember things you've been trying to remember, or avoiding remembering. So that's why I use song lyrics, get obsessed with certain TV shows set in certain places, and also get stuck with actually turning thoughts into artwork in case I can't make it as good as the cerebral version!

And here are just some relevant songs to ponder on...

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my favourites! This song (No Surrender) obviously is about being friends for forever, but something I also thought about was something Stevie Nicks said when I saw Fleetwood Mac, about how audiences and musicians have a reciprocal cooperative relationship.

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