That’s the secret hope buried in nostalgia: the feeling that maybe, if you make it, you’ll finally get back to the warm places you remember. There’s no difference between watching a trapeze swinger flip toward the sky with the person you love the most and finally clawing up to the place you’re supposed to end up if you’re good. And really, in the world of this song, there’s no difference between eternal reward and the feeling you hunger for through your best memories. “Please remember me,” he begs some long-lost childhood friend turned lover, braiding fondly recalled days from his past together with images of angels, Heaven, and graffiti-spangled pearly gates.
If anyone can glide frictionlessly across nine minutes of gentle memories, it’s Sam Beam. He hopes she also keeps them: “I wanna hear you say, ‘I remember you.’ ” –Jon Hadusek His heartbroken sentiments are those of reflection he acknowledges the end of the relationship, but won’t discard the experiences they shared together. It’s one of the great power ballads of all time, following a vulnerable Sebastian Bach as he tries to shake the memory of a lost lover. I wasn’t even alive in that decade, and yet I suddenly become familiar with it via a song like Skid Row’s “I Remember You”. The definition of dated, the chorus effect has a wondrous caveat, in that it instantly teleports you to the ’80s. The effect was ubiquitous throughout the 1980s: If you were recording a major label album, your guitars were slathered with warm, synthetic tones. Guitarists hate chorus delay, and for good reason.
View this list less as a “best of” and more as a psychological breakdown of nostalgia in pop music. The 21 songs here depict 21 distinct ways of coping with, embracing, and analyzing the past. Some, however, reflect with resignation, accepting that one can’t change the things that’ve already happened.
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