Somewhere on the road to Fujairah, sometime in the very-early 90s, our car pulled over beside a small ramshackle shop that had materialised out of the desert, sudden and unannounced, a few crates of fruit stacked near the entrance, the heat sitting on everything like it owned the place. Not a tree in sight.
My family had gone in to look at what was on offer or grab something cold, the way you do on long drives when stopping is its own small event. I stayed in the backseat. The engine was off, which meant the air conditioning was off, which meant the UAE had made its feelings about this very clear, very quickly.
I’d left the window open. Arabic music drifted in from somewhere, slow and warm, in no particular hurry about anything.
I was really young and understood not a single word.
But it got in anyway, the way certain things do when you’re young enough not to have opinions about them yet, arriving through the skin rather than the mind, without asking permission, without leaving a forwarding address. I didn’t know I’d still be carrying it thirty years later. I don’t think music cares whether you know.
This is the most honest answer I can give when someone asks what kind of music I like.
I have Hindi film songs from a cassette that played through an entire Friday afternoon without anyone thinking to turn it off, which I can hum note for note and which return me briefly to being very small, adults doing adult things nearby, the music just there. I have songs I found in my twenties that I cannot name but could navigate toward by memory alone, the way you find a light switch in a familiar dark room, a B-side from a band I could half-name at best whose sound I’ve never quite shaken. I have that Arabic music from the car. I have whatever came on in a café in London, Spanish I think, that rearranged something in me before the second verse and has never quite rearranged it back.
Music genre, I’ve come to realise, is a filing system.
It has very little to do with what actually happens when you hear something that reaches you.
What actually happens is this — the music arrives somewhere before your brain does. It finds the part of you that sits below taste and opinion and the careful management of what you’re seen to enjoy, and it does what it wants with it. You can be driving somewhere entirely ordinary on a Monday morning, mildly irritated about something that won’t survive the week, and a song comes on. Your throat tightens without asking you and you find yourself blinking at a roundabout like it’s the saddest roundabout in England, and there’s nothing to be done about it. The feeling has already happened. You’re only catching up.
I watched some children in Covent Garden a few weeks ago. Five or six years old, they’d been pulled up short by a busker, the kind London produces with such casual abundance. I couldn’t make out the song from where I stood but I couldn’t help but stop and notice how they moved.
Not in the way children do when they’re performing for adults, not the self-conscious shimmy you see at school concerts.
Just spontaneous, unguarded movement, like a door opening in a room that was already warm.
Kids that age haven’t yet learned that music is something you’re supposed to have an opinion about, or learned to wonder whether it was cool or age-appropriate or the right kind of thing. They heard something and their bodies answered and the answering was so clean and so complete that I stood there watching for much longer than I meant to.
I have wept at songs in languages I don’t speak, and laughed too, and felt that particular pull to grab someone by the arm and say listen, just listen to this. The weeping kind needs a minute of sitting before you’re fit for other people again. The other kinds need company immediately or something is lost.
Some songs I understand only in feeling. Arabic songs that carry the specific weight of a childhood I haven’t fully translated. Something I heard once in what I think was Polish, in a restaurant in London, that I’ve never managed to track down since. The words were entirely opaque to me and the meaning was perfectly clear, because music doesn’t really traffic in words. Words are sometimes just the vehicle. What it’s actually carrying goes in somewhere else, somewhere that never needed a language to begin with.
My son knows this. We didn’t set out to teach it to him. We never sat him down with the classics, never mapped out what he should love or in what order. Music just happened around him the way weather does, constant and unplanned, songs in the car and badly sung things in the kitchen and everything in between.
And somewhere, without announcing it, he absorbed it. He has opinions about music now, fierce ones, some of which are genuinely wrong, and I am prouder of him for having them than I can easily account for. There are things I’ve tried to give him deliberately and watched not quite land. This one arrived by accident and stayed.
Nobody decides to give music to anyone, not really.
It just goes where it goes, and the people it reaches are rarely the ones who were trying to find it.
You carry the songs of childhood into middle age and further still, and they hold things you forgot you were holding. The smell of a room, a particular quality of light on a particular afternoon, the face of someone you haven’t thought about in years. Memory knows what it’s doing when it ties itself to music. It’s making sure it can find you later.
I still don’t know what kind of music I like.
I just know that somewhere between a ghazal on a Sunday afternoon, an Indian film score, an Arabic song through an open car window and a nameless thing in Spanish, I found something that felt like home.
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