The song has been in my head for thirty-seven years. I know every note, every pause, every place where the bass drops out and comes back in like a revelation. I have sung it in the shower, hummed it while walking, played air guitar to it in my kitchen. I know this song.
Except.
“No,” says the internet, which knows everything and nothing. “Those aren’t the lyrics.”
I read the correct words. They make no sense. They are about something entirely different. Where I heard longing, there is defiance. Where I heard loss, there is celebration. The song I have been singing is not the song that exists.
“Also,” says the internet, pleased with its corrections, “that song came out three years after the other one you always think of together.”
But they sound the same. The guitar work is identical. The drummer does that thing with the hi-hat on the off-beat. They belong together, these songs, in the same moment, the same year, the same band.
“Different band,” says the internet.
I check again. The internet does not change its mind.
Memory is a liar, but memory is also a composer. It takes fragments—a guitar riff here, a voice there, the way light looked coming through arena smoke—and arranges them into coherent songs. Memory writes its own lyrics.
The coat I wore to that concert was brown leather, soft from years of wear. I found it at a thrift shop in college. It had a cigarette burn on the left cuff that I thought made it look authentic, lived-in. I wore it everywhere that mattered.
I am certain of this coat.
I am certain I went with Sarah, who introduced me to both bands, who knew all the words before anyone else did, who could spot the good concerts three months in advance.
I call Sarah.
“I’ve never been to a concert with you,” she says. “I don’t even like live music. Too loud. Remember? I’m the one who stays home and reads.”
This is true. Sarah has always stayed home and read. Sarah has never liked loud anything.
But I remember her there, next to me, singing along, her voice mixing with mine in that particular harmony you can only achieve when you both know every word by heart.
“You’re thinking of someone else,” Sarah says, kindly.
Point: I was there. Counterpoint: Memory is composed, not recorded.
Point: The beer incident happened. Counterpoint: But when? And with whom?
A man stumbled, drunk on arena beer and the particular euphoria that comes from being in a crowd of ten thousand people all feeling the same rhythm. His plastic cup connected with my chest, cold beer soaking through the brown leather coat, the smell following me home on the subway, clinging to the leather for weeks.
This happened.
But maybe not when I think it happened. Maybe not where I think it happened. Maybe not with the person I remember standing next to me.
The brain likes patterns. Show it two guitar solos that bend notes in similar ways and it will file them in the same folder. Show it two drummers who both use that rolling tom fill before the chorus and it will assume they are the same drummer, or played in the same band, or at least existed in the same moment of musical history.
The brain is an archivist with poor filing habits.
I discover that the guitarists I always conflated did, in fact, play together once. On a session album. In 1982. Five years after the concert I remember, three years before the concert I apparently actually attended.
The brain is an archivist with excellent intuition.
“You remember that concert we went to in 1979,” my friend Mike says tonight over dinner, apropos of nothing, “when you got drenched with beer?”
Not 1977. Not 1978.
Mike was there. Mike remembers the beer, the coat, the way I tried to wipe myself off with a napkin someone handed me from three rows away. Mike remembers my irritation turning to laughter when the band launched into their encore and the whole thing suddenly seemed like part of the performance.
“You wore that brown coat,” Mike says. “Still smelled like beer when we met for lunch the next week.”
Mike was there. Mike, not Sarah. Mike, who has been to dozens of concerts with me but whom I never think of as a concert-going person because Mike is serious and wears ties and works in accounting.
But Mike was there, in 1979, watching me get baptized in arena beer while a band I thought was someone else played a song I thought was about something else.
The phenomenology of error: How does it feel to discover that your memory has been writing its own songs all along?
It feels like a musical phrase that resolves unexpectedly, landing on a chord you didn’t see coming but that makes perfect sense once you hear it.
It feels like discovering that you’ve been singing harmony to a song that was actually a solo.
It feels like the moment in a jazz performance when the bass player takes the melody in a completely different direction and everyone else has to follow, and somehow it works, and afterward you can’t remember how the original melody was supposed to go.
I listen to the song again, with the correct lyrics, trying to hear what the songwriter actually intended.
But thirty-seven years of misheard words have carved neural pathways too deep to abandon. The song still sounds like longing to me. The guitar still sounds like loss. My version of the lyrics still fits the melody better than the actual ones.
This is not a failure of memory. This is memory doing what memory does: taking the raw material of experience and composing it into something meaningful.
The song I know exists. I created it, note by note, mishearing by mishearing, over decades of private performance.
The song the songwriter wrote also exists, in recording studios and copyright databases and the correct lyrics websites that never lie.
Both songs are real. Both songs are false.
Tonight I sing in the shower, letting the water drum against the tile, creating my own rhythm section. I sing the words I know, the words I made up, the words that mean what I need them to mean.
The song sounds exactly the same as it always has.
Mike calls while I’m drying off.
“Remember that other concert,” he says, “the one where you lost your wallet?”
I don’t remember losing my wallet at any concert.
“You were wearing that black jacket,” Mike says. “The one with the zipper.”
I have never owned a black jacket with a zipper.
“It was 1981,” Mike says. “Or maybe 1983.”
Here we go again, I think.
Here we go again, memory says, pulling out its composer’s notebook, ready to write another song that never happened exactly the way we’ll remember it.