We came up from an underground tour as golden hour faded over Edinburgh. After an hour exploring the old streets beneath the Royal Mile, the open sky felt enormous. The afternoon crowds had thinned out, and from somewhere up the street, a busker was singing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”
His voice was rough around the edges, but he meant every note, and it pulled our whole group in. Within a few bars, we were all singing along, old friends and new. The hair on my arms stood up.
“This is the song,” I said.
Nobody argued. They already knew what I meant.
The Only Thing I Bring Home
I don’t buy souvenirs anymore. After more than twenty-five years of minimalism, the magnets and keychains stopped making the trip home with me. For the last ten years, though, I’ve always come back with one thing: a song.
It started in 2016, in the back of an Uber on the way to the Louvre. A song came on, and the voice grabbed me. I’d never heard it before, so I wrote down the lyrics I could catch and looked it up later. It was “Lost on You” by LP, and it’s still one of my favorite songs.
Every trip since has had one. Some take longer to arrive than others, but none has gone without.
A souvenir sits on a shelf and reminds you that you went somewhere. A song takes you back. When one of mine comes on unexpectedly, a highlight reel starts playing in my head, and I’m there again, with the same people beside me. One song holds an entire trip, and it takes up no room in my bag.
It Has to Find You
I call it a hunt, but you can’t actually go looking for the song. If I picked one in advance, or tried to choose the best song I heard, it wouldn’t work. The song has to find me, through a busker, a speaker in a shop, or a driver’s radio. It’s a butterfly. Chase it, and it’s gone. Stay open, and eventually it lands on you, and when it does, you know.
In Dublin, “Shallow” by Lady Gaga seemed to follow us all trip, playing again and again. Then we heard a busker perform it, and he was incredible. That was the moment it became the song.
The Edinburgh busker was nowhere near that polished, and it didn’t matter. The right song arrives on its own schedule. This time, it took until the second night.
The Painting on the Stairs
That should have been the end of it. Then we walked back to our hotel.
One staircase had a gallery wall, and at check-in I’d glanced at a framed painting and thought it was David Bowie. That night I looked again and saw the cropped orange hair. It was Annie Lennox.
Later, we sat in the hotel bar for a nightcap with another wall of frames behind us. One of our group pointed to a black-and-white photo of a man and a woman and wondered who they were. I ran it through Google Image search. It was an early photograph of the Eurythmics.
It always happens like this. Once the song finds me, it keeps finding me.
Every trip comes with a whole economy telling you what’s worth bringing home. Scarcity says a trip only counts if you have something to show for it. Sufficiency trusts that the part worth keeping will find you, and it goes wherever you go.
A painting I mistook for Bowie and a photo on a bar wall don’t prove anything to anyone else. To me, they add up to Edinburgh.
A Small Practice
Think of a stretch of your life worth keeping. It could be a trip, a summer, a year at a job, or the months after a big change. Then ask yourself: what was playing?
If a song comes to mind, play it once this week, all the way through, and let the highlight reel run. Pay attention to what comes back first. It’s usually a face or a place, and rarely anything you bought.
If nothing comes to mind, don’t go searching. Leave the question open. Over the next few days, a song may catch you off guard in a car, in a store, or on the street. You’ll know it’s yours when your body answers before your brain does.
See you next week.
P.S. What’s the souvenir you’ve actually kept from a trip, whether it’s a song or something on your shelf? Hit reply and tell me. Mine is still stuck in my head.