Because sometimes out of the dross of the present it does. Mysteriously. Who knows what it is that dislodges a long forgotten face, landscape, or abstract but verifiably temporal emotion out from the massive, sedimentary shelves of our memories, but sometimes a word, a glance, a shaft of light summons memory from the deepest mausoleums of our minds and reanimates them before us, alive, full of blood, and none the worse for time and distance. Sometimes it's hard to remember who you used to be, sometimes you feel like you've changed so much that you shouldn't even recognize your memories as your own, but then a breeze will strike your face from a particularly resonant direction and you'll find yourself standing on the sidewalk of a twenty-three year old life as a momentary eleven year old, not bothering to wonder how you can reconcile the briefcase in your hand (sike, I don't use a briefcase) with the long forgotten porch of a treehouse you feel yourself standing on. It's a bizarre experience, but it's also enough to remind you that who you always were is who you always will be, even if only in sporadic and unpredictable spurts and splashes.
When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.
That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.
