These seven timeless tracks were secretly preparing us for heartbreaks we couldn't imagine and teaching us truths we were too young to understand.
The smell of vinyl and dust fills my nose whenever I walk past a thrift store record bin, and suddenly I'm seventeen again, sprawled across my sister's bedroom floor while her transistor radio crackled with static between stations.
We'd wait through commercials for jingles about toothpaste and local car dealerships just to hear that one perfect song again.
These days, when I catch certain melodies drifting from a coffee shop speaker or someone's open car window, I feel a peculiar ache for a version of life we didn't realize we were living so fully.
Those of us who came of age in the 70s thought we were just killing time, waiting for real life to begin.
We had no idea we were already living it.
The songs that soundtracked our ordinary moments have become time machines, each one carrying the weight of what we've gained and lost in the decades since.
1) "Dancing in the Moonlight" by King Harvest
There's something about this song that captures the casual optimism we all carried back then, before mortgages and mammograms.
"Everybody's feeling warm and bright," when did we stop believing that was possible?
I remember dancing barefoot on my friend's back porch to this song, a lukewarm beer in one hand, absolutely certain that every summer would feel exactly like this one.
We thought we'd always have time for impromptu gatherings that lasted until dawn.
Now when I hear it, I think about all the moonlit nights I've spent since then doing decidedly less carefree things: Walking colicky babies, sitting in hospital parking lots, and staring at the ceiling during my fifteen years as a single mother after my first husband left.
Yet the song still makes me smile.
Maybe because it reminds me that joy doesn't require perfect circumstances.
We danced in the moonlight then without knowing how precious those moments were.
Perhaps the trick is learning to dance now, even when we know.
2) "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas
This one hits differently after you've buried a parent, lost a job, or watched your children leave for lives of their own.
Back in the 70s, we thought we understood what "all we are is dust in the wind" meant.
We'd nod along sagely, feeling philosophical and deep.
How could we have known what it really meant to watch things slip through our fingers?
I heard this playing in a grocery store last month and found myself frozen in the cereal aisle, remembering my father's hands, strong and sure when I was young, then spotted and trembling near the end.
The song that once felt like poetry now feels like prophecy fulfilled.
Yet there's strange comfort in it too.
If everything is temporary, then so is pain, loneliness, and the fear that our best days are behind us.
3) "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac
"Thunder only happens when it's raining."
Stevie Nicks had a way of making heartbreak sound like wisdom, didn't she?
This song floated through every breakup of my twenties, including the big one - my divorce at 28.
Back then, I thought I was listening to a song about romantic loss.
I didn't realize it was teaching me about resilience.
Have you ever noticed how different this song sounds now? It's not just about lovers anymore.
It's about every dream that didn't quite materialize the way we imagined: The career paths that dead-ended, the friendships that faded, and the version of our seventies we pictured when we were seventeen.
"Players only love you when they're playing" applies to more than romance.
Yet Stevie's voice, both then and now, carries a kind of knowing strength.
She survived her storms, and so have we.
4) "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon
We all knew someone this song could have been about, didn't we?
That person who walked into parties like they were walking onto a yacht.
The funny thing is, at some point, we all thought we were that person too.
At least a little bit.
The 70s gave us permission to be self-absorbed in the most delicious way.
Now, I hear this song and laugh at how seriously we took ourselves.
All that time spent feathering our hair just right, choosing the perfect comeback, crafting our mystique.
These days, when I catch my reflection in a store window, I sometimes don't recognize the woman looking back.
When did I stop being the star of my own movie and become a supporting character in everyone else's?
But maybe that's the gift of aging: Learning that not everything is about us, and finding freedom in that release.
5) "American Pie" by Don McLean
Eight and a half minutes of pure storytelling that we knew every word to, even if we didn't understand half the references.
This song was our mythology, our shared language.
"The day the music died" meant something different to each of us, but we all sang it with the same conviction.
What strikes me now is how this song was already nostalgic when we were young.
McLean was mourning a loss we hadn't experienced, preparing us for our own future grief.
Every generation thinks the music dies with their youth.
But it doesn't die, does it?
It just changes, and we change with it, and sometimes late at night when this song comes on, we remember what it felt like to believe that our music, our moment, would last forever.
6) "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon and Garfunkel
This song used to make me think of romance: Someone who would lay themselves down for me.
Life has taught me that sometimes you have to be your own bridge.
During those years raising my children alone, working full days and then coming home to homework and housework, I learned what "weary" really meant.
Not the romantic exhaustion of staying up all night talking to someone new, but the bone-deep tired of carrying more than you thought you could.
Yet this song also reminds me of the unexpected bridges that appeared: The neighbor who watched my kids when I had to work late, the fellow teacher who covered my class when I couldn't stop crying in the supply closet, the strength I found in myself when I took early retirement and had to reimagine my entire identity.
Sometimes the troubled water is inside us, and the bridge appears when we finally stop fighting the current.
7) "Let It Be" by The Beatles
We thought this was about acceptance, about peace.
We had no idea it was actually about surrender: The kind that only comes after you've fought every battle you can think of and realized that some things simply are what they are.
"There will be an answer" sounded like a promise then, now it sounds like a prayer.
I think about all the things I've had to let be: My ex-husband's choices, my body's limitations that led to early retirement, and the path I thought my life would take versus the one it actually took.
The Beatles made surrender sound easy, spiritual even.
They didn't mention how it would feel to let go of dreams you'd held for decades, or how freedom and loss could feel exactly the same.
Final thoughts
These songs are proof that we lived, that we felt everything there was to feel, even when we didn't have words for it yet.
They remind us that the life we're nostalgic for was just young and maybe that's enough.
Maybe the gift of these songs is that they remind us we're still here, still capable of being moved by melody and memory.
The music never really died, it just learned to carry more weight.
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.
