Aimee Bender

Following our ‘Music and Memory’ event, part of the launch of Granta 111: Going Back, we have been asking writers to choose five songs or pieces of music which are important to them, and which bring back particularly salient memories.

Aimee Bender

1. Squeeze: ‘Black Coffee in Bed’

All those little physical triggers that evoke memory in a day-- how we can't get away from what we’ve experienced which seems to really be the theme of all five of these.

2. Stevie Wonder: ‘Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday’

Only Stevie Wonder could get away with a title like this. There’s the amazing joy and warmth always in his voice, around and up against the sadness of time and regret in the lyrics. I had a friend years ago who used Stevie Wonder as his example of genius. At that time, all I knew about Stevie Wonder was ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ and I didn't know what he was talking about; he immediately went and made a CD and set me right.

3. Leonard Cohen: ‘Chelsea Hotel #2

Such a great song, it should be on most lists. It’s kind of about a memory of a specific time, and maybe a specific person, but it’s also such a beautiful classic love and not-love song-- a song of ambivalence. Does he miss her? Did she use him? Did they love each other? Is memory helping any of this at all?

4. Jane Siberry: ‘In My Dream’

A ballad. Very direct and clear and beautiful. The way memory and longing collide-- how we remember, and then idealize, and then how the memory evaporates even as we think it. She used to play this for years at concerts and with every new CD I'd check to see if this song was on it and finally, on the most recent one, yes.

5. Kate Bush: ‘A Coral Room’

Well. I remembered this last night at one a.m, lying in bed, thinking of the assignment, going over CDs in my mind. It is the most profound song about memory and loss, and how memory works, and the way it sweeps over us, and how elusive it is, that I've ever heard. As with many of her songs, only after multiple listenings did it kick in for me. It’s an elegy to her mother, but with the first line – ‘there is a city, draped in net’ – it feels like she is trying to actually articulate the process of living at once in memory and the present, and how the two collide. It is really, really, not fun pub music at all! but it is a masterpiece of a song. The city, and the spider – they are first characters in a dream world, in the land of symbols, of myth, but then later they change, they become firm and strong, grounded with specific items, in a moment, in a life, and with that move, we are hammered down by the finality of loss. Kate Bush has many unbelievable songs, but this, one of her most recent, is as good as any that came before.