The end of September and the beginning of October bring an odd combination of the routine of being in the middle of a semester and a sense of rapid change, as the light hours are noticeably shorter every day, the shadows just a little longer when leaving and returning to the house.

1977: Judy Collins, “Send In the Clowns”

I don’t know if I heard this song when it was released or at any time thereafter. What I DO remember is playing this song in marching band, though I don’t remember if it was in high school or college. Some of those details, thirty years in the past, are somewhat blurry. Then again I could have played it when I was in the Albion Community Band, the first couple of summers out of high school. All I know is that I could probably, over three decades on, still pick out the trombone part.

1982: Rick Springfield, “I Get Excited”

I don’t have any particular memory of “I Get Excited,” probably because the guitar sounds so much like the guitar for “Jessie’s Girl” and the one is completely drowning out the other in my memory. Of the two, “Jessie’s Girl” is better.

1987: Belinda Carlisle, “Heaven is a Place On Earth”

Yeah, I heard Belinda Carlisle a lot back in my first year of college. Heavy rotation on MTV and the local pop music stations, though likely not so much from stereos and boom boxes, as the people I hung out with weren’t into pop quite this, well, pop-ey. So if this song being back any memories, those memories are of the smell of the lounge room of third-floor Copeland (men’s side) at GVSC.

1992: k.d. lang, “Constant Craving”

I heard this song a lot in the early nineties, both in the odd hours on MTV and in my car listening to WYCE, the alternative music station here in Grand Rapids. I certainly didn’t hear it while working at the restaurant, though I probably also heard it a lot when I started working at the bookstore the year after “Constant Craving” was released. When listening to it again I feel emotional echoes of the uncertainty of being done with college without any definite or defined plans for what my life would look like, going forward.

1997: Monica, “For You I Will”

I like “For You I Will,” but I have no specific memory of having heard it before putting this post together. It does have that particular mid-1990s vibe which means it sounds similar to numerous other songs in its loosely-defined genre, so it may have simply gotten lost in my memory of a quarter-century past. Also, I never saw Space Jam.