Does it ever happen to you that there’s a particular singer you absolutely adore and can no more imagine a life without that singer’s music than you can a life without, oh, I don’t know…your head? Eventually adoration interruptus takes place and the singer you believed would play in your walkman/CD player/tape deck for the rest of your natural life is shoved to the back burner for a year, two years, maybe more, like, well, more years than you’d like to admit.

Then one day, you’re listening to a k-RAY-zee mixed CD you’ve burned that includes one song performed by this particular musician and you’re thrown back to a particular time (or times) in your life as if you’re almost reliving them, but as an observer and not as a participant. You remember peeling up the driveway and out to the road, squealing the tires because you’re so angry with your parents for what seemed a life-shattering incident at the time, but now, some years later, you realize it totally wasn’t.

Or perhaps you remember pulling out of a certain midwestern city on a Greyhound bus, earphones clamped to your ears, your eyes filled with tears because you’re leaving the one person in the world you think understands you and loves you for you. Later on, this same artist would play a huge part of the soundtrack to a deeper relationship with that person when it was still in its infancy. Maybe there was a particular birthday you don’t remember as being especially noteworthy, except one of the gifts you received was the newest album by this very much adored singer.

How about the time in college when you might have been poking around a cheesy chain record store in a little podunk mall in a little podunk northeastern town and happening upon the singer’s first album. You’re very green in the admiration you feel, for that’s what it is at this point: admiration. Adoration is still a ways off. You know you don’t have the cash to buy it…but you do have a credit card. Of course, the credit card is linked to your parents’ account and you wonder if your father will ask why you’re spending the little bit of money you might have on something as frivolous as a CD. But you throw caution to the wind and snap down the credit card and the CD (still packaged in the old-school cardboard boxes).

Of course, by this time, you actually own a CD player…very much not like the time the summer previous when you bought a new CD by another performer on your short list of absolute favorites and had to buy the cassette tape, too because you didn’t have a CD player yet.

And then, the years pass, music comes and goes with a few performers cementing themselves onto your psyche in more than a crumbling and weeds-growing-through-the-cracks cement type way. Most music becomes transitory, brief obsessions whose fuses are burnt out as quickly as they start.

Then one day, you’re listening to a k-RAY-zee mixed CD you’ve burned that includes one song performed by this particular musician and all you want to do is immerse yourself in the music they’ve recorded for days. You want to drown yourself in it, in the words, in the music, in the memories. The singer is brilliant and quirky and has a beautifully strange and unique voice, as well as a way with words not many have and you realize you love this performer as much now as you did then, maybe even a little more because life has taught you more than you’d like to know sometimes. It’s a bittersweet reunion almost, for it speaks to you as you once were and you can never again regain the you from then.