When you are heading east on Interstate 24 in Tennessee about twenty miles outside of Chattanooga, you will drive through a town named Kimball—a town that you can barely see because of the mountains that stand in the way. You will curve south before being redirected eastward by way of the Interstate’s brief heartbeat monitor-shaped path, and as you approach the low point of the road’s exhalation you will find the mountains split and fall apart like curtains and give way to Nickajack Lake. The scenery that unfolds here will probably never compare to driving on the Golden Gate Bridge on a summer night while the sun melts into its watery horizon line or through a snowy, sleepy New England town during the winter or seeing the Manhattan skyline from across the Hudson. I don’t think Ansel Adams ever took a picture here. But on a sunny afternoon driving through this stretch of I-24, when the weather cooperates, is really a gorgeous sight to soak in—mostly because it all sneaks up on you. And the things that sneak up on us, the things or places that unexpectedly make us happy, provide most of the motive power for our nostalgia.
Think of a vacation you took or a party you hosted or attended: the things you remember most fondly are probably the things that were unplanned or unexpected. (And they probably involve alcohol.) The same things goes for objects and things from your childhood: you’ve probably already forgotten about most of the toys you wanted for a birthday or Christmas—toys you thought you’d die if you didn’t get—but you can remember a banal knick-knack at a relative’s house or the color of the refrigerator in your childhood home not only with ease but with a momentarily intense reference if you were to see something similar in present day.
When I was in high school it was briefly en vogue for record companies to re-release classic albums on CDs made with 24 karat gold. I have no idea who came up with the idea to make them but they were marked up double as a result and people bought them, for a little while at least. So I’m walking through a Best Buy in 1991 or 1992 and I see Quadrophenia by The Who with a $49.99 sticker on it. There is no track listing on the back or anything; I don’t even realize that it’s the 24 karat deluxe edition. I just assume that it’s a non-box set definitive Best Of disc and that’s why it’s $50. (At this point, I only knew of the albums Who’s Next and Who Are You by name; I had no idea what Quadrophenia was.) I go home, crack open the CD and look at the track list… and it’s filled with song titles I’ve never heard of before. What the fuck? I spent $50 for two gold discs filled with songs that didn’t sound familiar at all? I listened to both discs over the course of a week while doing homework and playing video games and I wind up loving the album more than loving the discovery of Nevermind or Ten.
To this day, I wish I could buy that album again for the first time and listen to it while playing Joe Montana Sports Talk Football in my childhood family room.
Almost by default the piano corners the market on nostalgia in terms of sound. If I were to tell you to think of the Roaring ’20s you would probably think of stock footage of flappers and people dancing with a few seconds of ragtime-y piano playing laid on top. Think of something sad: a somber piano with the notes spaced apart. Think of life in the ’50s and early ’60s: images of jitterbugging teens dancing to a Jerry Lee Lewis type piano playing. Any montage worth its salt probably features a piano. The piano is a great go-to instrument for montages and nostalgia-creation because its sounds can provide the smoothest transition between notes. Guitars are great too, but pianos are better for songs to slow dance to at weddings, or something sad or tragic, or providing a soundtrack for birthing videos—the important Life Stuff. It’s no coincidence that one of greatest outros ever produced (“Layla”) includes a piano that dwarfs Eric Clapton on all counts.
The first time I heard “Clocks” was, not surprisingly, during an opening montage for a profile piece. (If memory serves, it was a pre-game piece on TJ Ford the year Texas went to the Final Four.) I had never heard of Coldplay at this point so I had no idea that the song in the piece was by an artist because I never heard Chris Martin’s vocals during the piece—I just assumed that it was some track that nameless studio musicians recorded at some point. I was over at my dad’s house fixing his laptop when the song came on and it kind of stopped me in my tracks in a dog-that-hears-a-funny-noise kind of way.
The piano on “Clocks” isn’t really that propulsive or towering. It’s clearly in the foreground but it doesn’t bully itself there. Rather, the notes that emanate from the piano take the auditory form of a film projector: moving in a circle, over and over, constantly producing a different image. To me, “Clocks” (and Led Zeppelin’s piano-free “The Rain Song”) is a song that can almost literally be worked in to any montage—be it an actual one that can be seen on a screen of some sort, or an internal one created by a daydream or imagination.
Which brings me back to Kimball TN and Nickajack Lake.
In 2004 I was driving through the aforementioned stretch of I-24 on my way to the suburbs of Atlanta to see if I could find a job in lieu of possibly relocating there. Every two hours or so I had to search the radio for new stations once the static became too much to handle from being too far out of range. Flipping through the stations a couple miles outside of Nickajack Lake I landed on one that was in the midst of playing “Clocks.” I recognized the piano and the melody instantly and I did The Radio Prayer a few times (“Pleasepleasepleaseplease tell me the name of this song, DJ”) and, verily, the Radio Gods did smile upon me: for the DJ did disclose the name of the song and the artist who hath created it. (I now ask that you turn your bibles to Corgan 12:27.)
At the 3:26 mark of the song is when everything slows down a bit and the piano is the only instrument playing briefly; the guitars, the drums, the keyboards, they all fall away like the mountains when the lake appears. It was at the following moments of the song, when the instruments all re-form and resume the melody at a volume higher than before which sets up Martin’s wistful lyrics of wanting to go home so perfectly, that I approached the point in which the mountains gave way to a lake. The timing was so perfect that it could never be duplicated again. It felt like being in a movie, the scenery unfolding itself in harmony with the music under the direction of an unknown and extraordinarily gifted cinematographer. It’s a moment forever burned into my memory; something unexpected that will always become nostalgic whenever I hear this song or drive through Tennessee.
Fairly or unfairly, Coldplay has been branded as a boring band. Additionally: Chris Martin is married to Gwyneth Paltrow, their albums always seem to sell great; they seem like they are U2-In-Waiting. Their sound is polished to the point that it seems kind of impossible to imagine Coldplay as a struggling band playing the 3:00am Tuesday show at a no-name club or bar. All of these things can conspire to make them easy targets because, hell, U2 is in fact a great band but their U2-ness can be boring at times.
Born out of the power struggle between Oasis and Radiohead, Coldplay arrived in 2000 after Radiohead had won the war with their single “Yellow” and if nothing else, they are arguably the best all-around British band of the millennium’s first decade regardless of what you think of their music. The ’00s saw plenty of shiny polished ballad-y songs that enjoyed a nice stretch of popularity, songs like “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol and “How to Save a Life” by The Fray and “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” by Five For Fighting; songs that are instant memory markers and nostalgic points of reference, especially if you happened to be young when any or all of those songs poured out of your speakers. “Clocks” is not only the best song within this sub-genre of modern ballad-like songs it is also one of the best sneaky songs in general. It’s the kind of song that will probably never appear high on a list of best songs of the past 10, 15, or 20 years but it is the kind of song that can introduce itself at a perfect moment and become part of your life’s soundtrack—be it while driving across a lake in Tennessee, or wherever else.
To this day, I wish I could drive across Nickajack Lake while this is playing for the first time again, with everything in sync like it was.
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