The other day I found myself scrolling through Spotify looking for something to listen to. That sentence alone tells you how much the world has changed.
There was a time when discovering music meant wandering through a record store, flipping through albums or cassettes and deciding whether you were willing to gamble ten bucks on an entire record because you liked one song.
Today, virtually every song ever recorded is sitting in our pockets. And yet, with all that music available to me, I often find myself going backward.
Maybe it’s my age. Actually, forget I said that. Let’s just say I come from a time when albums mattered.
Back then, you didn’t just listen to one song and move on. You bought the album. You learned the album. Sometimes the songs you didn’t particularly like at first became your favorites simply because you heard them enough times to finally understand them.
And somewhere along the way, those songs became attached to people, places, relationships and Friday nights. Entire chapters of your life.
So there I was scrolling through music when, for reasons I can’t remember, I typed one word into the search box:
Foreigner.
And suddenly there she was again.
That mysterious image of a jukebox of the Records album appeared, with all of the band’s greatest hits.
I smiled, because I knew exactly where that album was going to take me.
Back to the summer of 1987.
It was a typical Friday night during the summer after high school. College had been temporarily delayed due to a minor technicality known as “I have no money,” so I was still living at home and working nine-to-five for minimum wage in the non-food receiving department of a local supermarket.
The plan was to save enough money to eventually study music at community college. Because, naturally, I was going to become a rock star. There wasn’t much doubt about that. At least not in my mind.
When work ended on Friday, I’d climb into my orange 1974 Ford Torino and meet up with my fellow musician buddies, Nathan and Ronnie, for a night of what we considered debauchery.
Granted, our definition of debauchery was slightly different from the traditional one. It usually involved miniature golf, cruising Northampton Street—better known to us as “The Strip”—and eventually winding up at a downtown Perkins restaurant eating cheese fries, drinking coffee and chain smoking while discussing our inevitable rise to rock-and-roll superstardom.
We were dangerous men.
I don’t remember exactly how Foreigner’s Records found its way into my cassette collection that summer. There’s a pretty good chance it came courtesy of Columbia House, where twelve albums could magically become yours for a penny, provided you agreed to purchase several more at regular club prices.
Side note: I’m fairly certain Columbia House still has a warrant out for my arrest for never fulfilling that agreement.
However it got there, Records became one of the soundtracks of that summer. And I mean the entire album.
That’s something younger music fans may never completely understand about cassettes. Skipping a song required work. You had to hit fast-forward, wait, stop the tape, hit play, realize you’d gone too far, rewind, stop again and hit play.
Forget it.
It was easier just to listen to the whatever song was playing. So that’s what I did. Over and over.
Eventually I knew everything from Cold As Ice through the live version of Hot Blooded. Songs like Urgent, Waiting For A Girl Like You and Juke Box Hero became part of the soundtrack of being eighteen years old and absolutely convinced me that the best years of my life were still waiting somewhere just beyond the horizon.
On Friday nights, we’d roll down the windows of the Torino and cruise The Strip with Lou Gramm blasting through my Kenwood stereo.
People occasionally stared at us at traffic lights, but we didn’t care. We were on a mission. Caring what other people thought was apparently something we’d scheduled for later in life.
Eventually, we’d wind up at the V-7 miniature golf course, where on one particular Friday night I somehow managed three holes-in-one—including one through the dreaded windmill.
To this day, I consider it one of my greatest athletic achievements. Nathan may have remembered it differently.
During my Tiger Woods-like domination of miniature golf, however, Ronnie seemed unusually quiet, and Nathan and I would soon discover why.
On the drive to Perkins, Ronnie announced that he wanted to hear True by Spandau Ballet. This was unacceptable.
Ronnie had recently gone through the breakup of what had been the first serious relationship among the three of us, and apparently Spandau Ballet was required for the healing process.
Nathan and I weren’t interested. After all, there were certain rules about driving in my Ford Torino, and one of them was that Spandau Ballet would never be played through the Kenwood.
As fate would have it, Foreigner’s Hot Blooded came on instead— The timing couldn’t have been better. We immediately informed Ronnie that Foreigner had apparently written the song specifically about him.
To this day, I’m not exactly sure what caused his breakup but the song fit, and at eighteen that was good enough for us.
Before long we landed at the downtown Perkins, counting the spare change in our pockets to make sure we had enough to cover coffee and french fries covered in imitation cheese. It was well after midnight, and we had nowhere else to be. There was something incredibly comforting about that.
There would be no alarm clocks the next morning. No responsibilities waiting. No mortgages, careers, deadlines or calendars telling us where we needed to be. That would all come years later.
Right now, we were just three friends sitting in a diner talking about girls, guitars, songwriting and all the incredible things we were going to do once the world finally discovered us.
Eventually, though, even eighteen-year-olds get tired.
As we walked back toward the Torino, Nathan suddenly started singing the Eagles’ Heartache Tonight in the parking lot. Ronnie and I joined him, in awful perfect three-part harmony. At 2:30 a.m. After several cups of coffee and an unhealthy amount of cheese fries. I’m sure it sounded magnificent.
Thankfully, there were no smartphones in 1987, so absolutely no evidence exists to contradict my version of events.
The three of us climbed back into the Torino, turned the music up and headed home.
It was just another Friday night. At least that’s what we thought.
Nearly four decades have passed since then.
The orange Torino is gone.
The V-7 is gone.
The Kenwood stereo is gone.
Columbia House is gone.
And sadly, Nathan is gone too. He passed away several years ago. It’s strange how that changes a memory.
For years, that night was simply one of hundreds of stories from my youth. Something Nathan, Ronnie and I could laugh about whenever the subject came up. Now it means something different.
I guess that’s one of the things nobody really tells you about getting older. The world you grew up in slowly begins disappearing.
Stores close.
Cars get sold.
Neighborhoods change.
And eventually, some of the people who shared those memories with you are no longer here to remember them.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’ve found myself writing more about the past lately. I’ve always been a writer, but these days I find myself increasingly drawn to the people, places and seemingly insignificant moments that helped define who I am:
A swimming pool on a summer afternoon, a childhood neighborhood, a freight train passing in the distance, or three young musicians sitting in a diner at midnight with barely enough money for cheese fries.
At the time, none of those moments seemed all that important. They were just life. Only years later do you realize they were the things that mattered.
It’s also something I found myself thinking about while writing my new novel, The Seventh Echo.
The book is a suspense story, but beneath the mystery is something I’ve become fascinated with as I’ve gotten older: the idea that the past never completely leaves us.
People and places remember. And sometimes things we thought we’d left behind have a way of finding us again.
Maybe memories work the same way.
They echo.
Which brings me back to Foreigner’s Records album.
The album and songs are still there. And whenever I hear them, something remarkable happens.
A photograph can remind you what something looked like. A story can remind you what happened. But music can make you feel a moment again.
For a few minutes, I’m not a man looking back nearly forty years. I’m eighteen again. The windows of the Torino are down, and it’s a warm Friday night in Easton.
Lou Gramm is blasting through the Kenwood. Ronnie is nursing a broken heart. Nathan is giving me grief because I’ve just sunk another hole-in-one. There’s just enough money in our pockets to cover cheese fries and coffee. And somewhere ahead of us is an entire lifetime that hasn’t happened yet.
None of us knows where we’re going. None of us knows how quickly those years will pass. And we certainly don’t know that one day only two of us will be left to remember that night.
But maybe that’s why I write these stories now. Things disappear, but stories give us a way to keep a little piece of them.
And music does too.
So every once in a while, I’ll put on Records and turn it up a little louder than a man my age probably should. And suddenly, I’m back in that orange Torino again, cruising The Strip with two of my best friends beside me.
All three of us are young. All three of us are dreaming. All three of us are still here.
And for the length of an album… that’s exactly where we’ll stay.
The Seventh Echo arrives on Tuesday, August 18th.
go.Jimmy.go 
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