Throughout the years, our taste in music may change and our favorite songs come and go as we expand our listening, but for me, there’s only one song that will forever remain my favorite song. It’s a song that’s timeless, though as I’ve grown older I’ve come to appreciate it in different ways. As a 13 year old girl I looked at the song as what my life would soon be, running around doing stupid things with my friends before we were forced to care about the world. Getting older, my friends and I became the kids in the song, and the sense of nostalgia that I would soon feel for these moments was being created all around me, before I even had time to realize it. All of the heartbreaks and losses, feelings of excitement, of newness, of learning and growth. We were the “cool kids who never had the time,” or so I felt, and it isn’t until these moments in time are through that we can understand what they meant and who we truly were at that time. You really do at this age feel that an end to all of this will never come, that you’ll be a child in this city that you grew up in forever, living the same years over and over again.

As I move on to new stages in my life, move to new cities, make new friends, gain new perspectives on life, 1979 stands as a reminder of all of these nostalgic moments in my life. Every time I listen to it, I feel grateful for all of the stupid, trivial, ridiculous moments I made growing up, ones I still experience I must say. It stands as a time machine to years that I can never get back, yet ones that live so vividly in my mind. At 19 years old, I know many of these years are still to come, but the innocence of living at home and growing up for me seems to already have faded, sentiments brought to life in the lyrics and sound of the song that I yearn for each time I hear it or play it on the guitar.

But time moves on, faster than we can ever imagine, as the song explains. The people we love change, despite our memories of the people they used to be, and at some point, you’re going to have to sit and accept that life is always going to moving, changing, evolving before you can even appreciate it for what it was. The last line of the song, “The streets heat the urgency of now, as you see there’s no one around,” has always reminded me of a breath of fresh air when you wake up early in the morning and look outside at the place where you’re living at the moment. Here, you can reflect, truly, on all that your life has been, all the ways that it’s changed and rewritten itself, yet through all of these changes, you’re still here, standing as a culmination of your youth, your friends, your family, your loves, and your losses. I play 1979 at moments of extreme change in my life, when I want to sit and take that morning air in before a new chapter of my life begins: before I graduate, before I say goodbye to a friend, before I leave home, before I move to cities far from where I grew up. I come to appreciate time and the immense speed at which it moves life along, remembering all that has gone and anticipate all that is to come.