It has always fas­ci­nated me how seem­ingly triv­ial things can trig­ger one’s mem­ory on a dime and trans­port you to another time or place in an instant– hid­den snap­shots of one’s life pep­pered through­out our daily com­ings and goings.

This morn­ing, pay­ing bills at my desk and watch­ing the rain pour down, iTunes sur­prised me with a mem­ory jolt– a musi­cal time machine back to col­lege:

This song always pro­pels me back in time to a rainy night in Pitts­burgh– bib­li­cal rain, soak­ing you to the bone and wait­ing on Car­son Street for the 54C back to Oak­land. The expe­ri­ence or night holds no sig­nif­i­cance to my present life, no new char­ac­ters came into my life that night, no pro­found obser­va­tions were made on that day, the rain did not cat­alyze any­thing other than hail­ing a taxi and yet it remains as a warm and vivid mem­ory: Crum­pled up in an old leather jacket, wait­ing beneath a street light flip­ping through sketch­books with the other reg­u­lar from my cof­feeshop (who was also wait­ing for the over­due bus), wet licorice streets, head­lights exag­ger­ated by raindrops…

It seems strange to me that such an insignif­i­cant moment in my life remains so firmly imprinted upon my mem­ory and yet it does.

What ran­dom moments are firmly implanted in your mem­ory, dear readers?

Recently, I’ve been on the prowl for new music. An odd side tan­gent to this exer­cise, has been an ongo­ing game with an old friend from col­lege wherein he quotes a song lyric, and I’m sup­posed to pick-up the song from that line or two. It’s fun, but what’s fun­nier is that we spent years together as col­leagues, lost touch after school but stayed friends like every­one from our under­grad­u­ate stu­dio group (a group of peo­ple who are more fam­ily than just a bunch of kids in a work room) and have never really talked much since school. Now all these years later we’re trad­ing lyrics, songs and mixes.

In my semi-High Fidelity state of mind, weav­ing musi­cal mixes in the back of my head, I’m left won­der­ing what untasted sound morsels (or bites if you pre­fer puns) are out there– what am I miss­ing? Tell me, dear read­ers, what sort of music have you been lis­ten­ing to lately? What are your favorite finds of the past year? And what are your obscure favorites?