Why does ‘Surrender’ make you nostalgic for the 1970s even if you weren’t born?
While bands like The Beatles might seem special and unprecedented, music is actually an incredibly natural part of our lives. It’s for this reason we attach sound to memory so easily.
You hear melody in absolutely everything: walking through the park with birds chirping, you recognise the sweetness of it, and the same goes for whistles in the wind, the rustling of leaves and the patter of footsteps, where with every aspect, you pick up rhythm, tempo and key. Even the more harsh noises we come across in mechanical and built-up areas constitute some form of music, to the extent that artist Luigi Russolo predicted the rise of industrial music in the wake of the revolution of the same name.
“Music originally sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound,” Russolo wrote in his manifesto, The Art of Noise, “Musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines… the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.”
Over-exposure to music (or sounds that resemble music) means that we are quick to stitch songs to memories, which can be a subconscious process or done much more intentionally. Hilde Østby and Ylva Østby wrote in their book, Adventures in Memory, about how music can act as a key trigger for various memories, stating, “Memory research is perfect for functional MRI studies. It can be carried out without any special equipment, beyond the MRI scanner, and the research participants perform a mental activity they are highly familiar with, without any outer influence.”
They added, “All we have to do is ask the test subject to retrieve a memory, perhaps with the help of a keyword”. She also noted that regarding sound, “Remarkably often, music is mentioned as a trigger for a personal memory”.
The memories we attach to music are sometimes incredibly subjective; for instance, if your first wedding dance is to Ed Sheeran’s ‘Thinking Out Loud’, whenever you hear it next will always bring up feelings of warmth as it will take you back to that special moment.
On the other hand, some musical memories are a lot more universal than that. If a song was number one for an entire summer and was playing everywhere, then listeners will subsequently think of summer months in general when playing it. Equally, if lyrics are vague and talk broadly about love, grief, and all things in between, then many will likely relate to that song, even if it doesn’t apply to a specific moment in their lives.
This is why perhaps so many of us feel hits of nostalgia when we listen to Cheap Trick’s ‘Surrender’. Rick Nielsen was an adult when he wrote it, and admitted when he was putting pen to paper, he had to “Go back and put myself in the head of a 14-year-old”. The words about a struggling couple told from the point of view of a child aren’t taken from Nielsen’s own experiences specifically, but from some memories of his childhood, memories of different problems his friends’ parents had, as well as references to other pieces of art.
“I used to hear my friends saying they thought their parents were strange,” he admitted, “The first thing I got was the opening of the chorus: ‘Mommy’s all right, daddy’s all right’. It just rolled off at one sitting. Those opening lines, ‘Mother told me, yes, she told me I’d meet girls like you’. That ‘s advice to the lovelorn, and obviously inspired by the old Shirelles hit ‘Mama Said (There’d Be Days Like This)’. It’s a good way to start a song, if you can make it go with a chord progression.”
There isn’t one influence contributing to these lyrics; there are multiple, each of which has the power to trigger some form of memory in the listener. The broad nature of the song means that it is a beacon for nostalgia, even if it doesn’t apply to the listener’s life. Taken from other music, his friends, and Nielsen’s own life, there will be some lines in the track that most will be able to relate to, and that means it’s considered a nostalgic pick, even if you weren’t kicking around when the original was making hay in the sun.
