Taking It Back: How to Reclaim the Songs That Were Stolen From You
Have you ever had a song have a particular power over you because you associate it with someone else? That can be very romantic, until things end very badly and now a perfectly good song is ruined. Today at work I heard one that used to be “our song” and I have cringed every time I’ve heard it since the messy split. But today, I took it back. I’m taking all of them back. Because music shouldn’t be imprisoned for my bad choices in men.
There’s a name for what happens to us when a song becomes inseparable from a person or a moment. Psychologists call it music-evoked autobiographical memories — the brain’s stubborn habit of stapling a melody to an experience so firmly that one can’t exist without summoning the other. It’s the reason a three-minute pop song can do what a photograph can’t: it doesn’t just show you the past, it pulls you back into the feeling of it. Your chest tightens. Your stomach drops. Suddenly you’re not standing in the frozen food aisle anymore — you’re back in that car, on that night, next to that person who would eventually make you question your own judgment entirely.
The cruelty of it is that the song itself did nothing wrong.
Fleetwood Mac didn’t write “The Chain” for him. Whoever made your particular soundtrack had no idea they were handing someone the keys to a very specific corner of your nervous system. The music existed before he did, and — here’s the part worth holding onto — it will exist long after the memory of him has faded into something mild and vaguely embarrassing, like a regrettable haircut.
So how did we get here, and why does it hurt so much?
When we fall for someone, our brains are essentially drenched in dopamine. Everything we experience during that period gets tagged as significant — the restaurants, the inside jokes, the particular slant of light on a Sunday morning. Music, though, has an unfair advantage over all of it. Sound bypasses the rational brain almost entirely and lands straight in the limbic system, which is responsible for emotion and memory. A song you loved together doesn’t just remind you of him; it reactivates the emotional state you were in when you first heard it together. Your brain, bless its well-meaning heart, filed it under important — and it has been faithfully retrieving it ever since.
This is also why breaking up can feel like a kind of theft. Suddenly whole swaths of your own taste — music you loved before him, music you’d have loved regardless — are behind a velvet rope with his name on it. You change the station. You skip the track. You build careful little detours around the parts of your own life that he’s contaminated.
That is, until you don’t.
Taking it back is not a single dramatic moment. It’s a practice.
What happened to me today at work wasn’t magic. It was the hundredth small act of reclamation finally breaking through. I’ve been doing this quietly, imperfectly, for a while now — and I want to tell you what actually works, because “just get over it” is genuinely useless advice.
Listen on your terms, in your space. The ambush is the worst part. Hearing a loaded song unexpectedly, in public, with nowhere to put the feeling — that’s what makes you cringe and change the channel. So instead, choose to hear it first. Put it on deliberately, at home, when you have the space to feel whatever comes up. You are no longer at the mercy of some radio algorithm. You are the one who pressed play.
Layer new memories over the old ones. The brain is not a museum — it’s a living thing that keeps rewriting its own exhibits. Play the song on a road trip with your best friend. Play it while you’re cooking something you love. Play it when you’re laughing. You cannot erase the old association, but you can crowd it out with new ones until it becomes a small room in a much bigger house.
Let it be sad, and then let it be finished. Sometimes a song is going to ambush you and it’s going to sting, and the worst thing you can do is panic and flee. Sit with it for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Actually listen. What made you love this song before him? Find that thing. It was yours first.
Rewrite the story you tell about it. Right now, this song might mean us — the whole doomed, badly-lit production of it. But that’s just one story. In a year, it might mean the summer I started trusting myself again. Meaning is not fixed. You are the one who assigns it, which means you are the one who can change it.
Here’s what I know for certain:
Music is one of the most human things we have. It has carried grief and joy across every culture, every century, every version of love gone right and love gone spectacularly sideways. It is far too large and too generous to belong to one person’s memory of one failed relationship.
He doesn’t get the song. He never did. It was always yours — you just forgot for a while.
Turn it up.
