Max Schaefer

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.

Max Schaefer

Bonus track (not a song): ‘I'm So Perplexed Without You, Baby’

From a compilation of old ‘Recordio-grams’ – one-off discs made in the audio equivalent of a photo booth, as souvenirs or gifts. Some time in the 1940s, a young guy in New York sends a Christmas message to his girlfriend. He seems to think she needs reminding of his existence.

1. Pino Donaggio: ‘John’s Theme (Love Scene)’ from Don’t Look Now

Also not a song, but the key memory theme in a film dense with ideas on the subject. This version is used over the love scene, which famously cross-cuts Sutherland and Christie having sex with their separate toilets afterwards, binding intimacy to the solitary interiority that cannot but follow it.

2. Caetano Veloso: ‘London London’

A song about how safe, but also how strange and lonely, Veloso found London when in exile here: memories of Brazil are implicit. Are the flying saucers he keeps looking skywards for emblems of its unfamiliarity, or a means of escape?

3. Kanye West: ‘Coldest Winter’

From West's underrated album 808s and Heartbreak. The lyrics don't need much glossing.

4. Nina Simone: ‘Love's Been Good to Me’

The last two songs find loneliness in remembering. Here at least memory mitigates. Simone's version is preferable to Sinatra's and has the added advantage of flipping the gender. Michael Stipe should cover it.

5. Leonard Cohen: ‘Alexandra Leaving’

I have nothing to add to Cohen's lyrics here, which are adapted from Cavafy, and devastating.