After a busy morning yesterday, I decided I deserved the afternoon off. I sat in front of YouTube, allowing it to numb me. I was barely paying attention when the algorithm threw me a curveball, one that carried me straight back to the seventies.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I once worked night shifts in the Safeway supermarket on Paisley Road West. One morning, after finishing work, I wandered into Glasgow for no particular reason. As I passed Midland Street, a haunting piece of music drifted from a record shop. It was called Daybreak by an Irish group named Horslips. I walked straight in and bought it.
Back on the nightshift, I would play it over the public address system. My colleagues heard it too, and soon they were buying the album for themselves.
Their next album, The Man Who Built America, ended—if I remember rightly—with a melancholic track called I’ll Be Waiting. It’s a song about migration and It always made me feel strangely lonely, as though I were standing at the end of something.
Yesterday, that very song emerged on YouTube, this time played with the Ulster Orchestra. Some songs aren’t merely heard—they’re imprinted. They lie dormant for years, like seeds scattered across the soul in youth, waiting for time and experience to crack them open. Then, suddenly, decades later, a familiar melody resurfaces—not as background music, but as a key turning in the lock of memory.
In that moment, you’re no longer the age you are. You’re every age you’ve ever been. The tune becomes a threshold, transporting you back to a room you forgot you once inhabited, or to a version of yourself long buried beneath the sediment of years.
But it’s more than memory. It’s a kind of existential vertigo. Because the music doesn’t just bring the past forward—it reveals the distance travelled. It highlights the ache of transience. The weight of being. It reminds you that once, you felt everything with raw immediacy—and that now, you live with the knowledge you will never be that unguarded again.
This is nostalgia not as sentimentality, but as spiritual gravity—a longing for something both lost and eternal. The music becomes the ghost of your former self, and you find yourself mourning not only what was, but what could have been. It’s as if the soul remembers something the mind cannot articulate. I find it faith strengthening; a sense that life is more than chronology, and that these echoes from the past are proof we were meant to be more than dust and decay.
And so, you listen again. Not for pleasure alone, but for anchorage. Because in a world where everything changes, the song still plays—and in it, for a moment, so do you.
I’ll Be Waiting Horslips "I'll Be Waiting"
Tell me dear reader, do you share my sentiment? Share your comment in the comments box
Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot
