That estate sale stereo crackled to life with a forgotten 45, and suddenly this 70-year-old was seventeen again, every word of a song she hadn't heard in decades pouring from her lips like muscle memory.
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The smell of old vinyl and lemon furniture polish hit me the moment I walked into that estate sale last Tuesday.
Funny how certain combinations of scents can transport you faster than any time machine.
I was rifling through a box of 45s when the homeowner's daughter started playing her mother's favorites through an ancient stereo system.
That's when it happened.
A song I hadn't heard in decades filled the room, and suddenly I was seventeen again, slow dancing in my parents' basement with a boy whose name I can't even remember now.
Isn't it remarkable how music lives in our bones?
We think we've forgotten these songs, filed them away in some dusty corner of memory along with phone numbers we used to know by heart and the taste of penny candy.
But then, usually when we least expect it, they come flooding back.
The melody starts, and before you know it, you're singing every word, your voice cracking on the high notes just like it did fifty years ago.
1) "Build Me Up Buttercup" by The Foundations
This one gets me every single time.
Last month at the grocery store, it came on over the speakers while I was squeezing avocados, and I found myself doing a little shoulder shimmy right there in produce.
The teenage stock boy looked at me like I'd lost my mind, but I didn't care.
This song was everywhere in 1968.
We'd sing it walking home from school, belt it out at slumber parties, and dedicate it on the radio to whoever we had a crush on that week.
What strikes me now is how perfectly it captures that delicious agony of young love - all that yearning and disappointment wrapped up in the catchiest melody you ever heard.
These days, when I hear it, I think about how we spent so much time then worrying about who would call us on Friday night.
Now I'm grateful when anyone calls me at all, even if it's just my dentist confirming an appointment.
2) "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" by Looking Glass
Do you remember where you were the first time you heard this one?
I was working my first summer job at a roadside ice cream stand, and this song played on repeat on the little transistor radio we kept by the soft-serve machine.
Every time it came on, my coworker would dramatically lip-sync the "such a fine girl" part while scooping chocolate chips.
I heard it again recently at my nephew's wedding - the DJ was taking requests from "the older crowd" - and was amazed at how the whole story came rushing back.
Poor Brandy, waiting for her sailor who loved the sea more than her.
Back then, we all thought we were Brandy, didn't we?
Waiting for someone who might never quite love us enough.
Now I realize the real tragedy might have been Brandy not getting on a boat herself and seeing what was out there.
3) "Dancing in the Moonlight" by King Harvest
This song is pure summer, 1972.
I was fresh out of my first marriage, trying to figure out how to be a single mother to two toddlers, and this song would come on the radio during our evening drives to get them to sleep.
Something about that gentle rhythm and those optimistic lyrics - "everybody's feeling warm and bright" - made me believe things would work out somehow.
When I heard it at my friend's 70th birthday party last year, half the room started swaying immediately.
No one had to think about it; our bodies just remembered.
That's the thing about this song - it's impossible to feel cynical when it's playing.
Even now, when my knees protest a bit more about actual dancing, it still makes me want to find a moonlit field somewhere and spin around like we used to, when spinning didn't require a chiropractor appointment the next day.
4) "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" by Edison Lighthouse
Talk about a song that sneaks up on you.
I was at my granddaughter's school play (they were doing a '70s revue, bless them), and when this started playing, I could literally feel my ponytail swishing, even though I haven't worn my hair that way since Nixon was president.
This was the song that played everywhere in 1970 - at the roller rink, at the mall, coming from car radios at the drive-in.
We thought we were so sophisticated, understanding all that "crazy like a lazy daisy" business.
The truth is, we had no idea what half those lyrics meant, but we sang them with absolute conviction anyway.
Hearing it now, I'm struck by how innocent it all was, how simple the idea of love seemed then.
5) "Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone
My sisters and I would blast this in our shared bedroom, using hairbrushes as microphones, driving our parents absolutely crazy.
"Turn that racket down!" my father would yell up the stairs, but we never did.
This song was rebellion wrapped in a beat you couldn't resist.
It popped up in a movie my grandson was watching when he visited last Christmas, and I started dancing in my kitchen, spatula still in hand.
He looked at me with new eyes - like maybe his grandmother wasn't just someone who made good cookies and worried about his college applications.
"You know this song, Grandma?" he asked.
Know it? Honey, this song is practically embedded in my DNA.
6) "Hooked on a Feeling" by Blue Swede
That "ooga-chaka" opening is probably the most ridiculous beginning to any song ever recorded, and yet the moment you hear it, resistance is futile.
I was at my doctor's office last week (the waiting room playlist was clearly compiled by someone my age), and when this came on, every single person over 65 started grinning like idiots.
We were all so serious about this song in 1974, slow dancing to it at school dances like it was the most romantic thing ever written.
Those "I'm high on believing that you're in love with me" lyrics felt so deep and meaningful.
Now? It just makes me happy.
Pure, uncomplicated happy.
Sometimes that's all a song needs to do.
7) "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum
This one stopped me in my tracks at a rest stop in Ohio last month.
It was playing from someone's car, windows down, that distinctive guitar riff cutting through the highway noise.
Suddenly, I was back in my classroom, my first year teaching, trying to use this song to explain rhythm and repetition in poetry to a bunch of teenagers who thought I was ancient at thirty.
What I love about rediscovering this song at seventy is how different it hits now.
All that talk about "when I die and they lay me to rest" seemed so abstract back then.
Now? Well, let's just say it resonates differently.
But instead of being morbid, it's oddly comforting.
That fuzzy guitar, that confident declaration of where we're going - it's like a musical security blanket for those of us starting to think about these things more seriously.
Final thoughts
These songs aren't just nostalgia - they're time capsules of who we were, little pieces of our younger selves preserved in melody and rhythm.
When we hear them again, we're not just remembering the songs; we're remembering the people we used to be, the hopes we had, the hearts we broke and had broken.
And maybe that's the real magic - not that we'd forgotten them, but that they were there all along, waiting patiently in the grooves of our memory, ready to remind us that inside these seventy-year-old bodies, those kids who sang along at the top of their lungs are still very much alive and still know every single word.
Just launched: Laughing in the Face of Chaos by Rudá Iandê
Exhausted from trying to hold it all together?
You show up. You smile. You say the right things. But under the surface, something’s tightening. Maybe you don’t want to “stay positive” anymore. Maybe you’re done pretending everything’s fine.
This book is your permission slip to stop performing. To understand chaos at its root and all of your emotional layers.
In Laughing in the Face of Chaos, Brazilian shaman Rudá Iandê brings over 30 years of deep, one-on-one work helping people untangle from the roles they’ve been stuck in—so they can return to something real. He exposes the quiet pressure to be good, be successful, be spiritual—and shows how freedom often lives on the other side of that pressure.
This isn’t a book about becoming your best self. It’s about becoming your real self.
