Swandives

It’s funny how one piece of music can instantly transform you to a previous time and place with an intensity that is so full-on it’s like all your senses were on overload; smell, taste, colour, every detail like it was digitally captured in your mind for all posterity. No fuzzy analogue involved.

So it is for the Screaming Trees album, Dust. Sure, in 1996 the Grunge musical movement was in its death throes but it remains, Nevermind notwithstanding, *the* album of the Seattle sound.

Funnily enough, my digital memory moment is not actually from the nineties. It’s from 2003 when, newly married and on what remains the best holiday of my life in North West Australia, the beloved and I drove from Exmouth to Shark Bay. A honeymoon remembered for its blue, blue skies, rich red soil, sunsets to match, a long straight road punctuated every few miles by the odd dead kangaroo carcass and massive, massive roadtrain. We crossed a wide brown country that I had lived in all my life but never truly known in a white Nissan X-trail with The Screaming Trees blaring and the wind in our hair. And when I hear Dust I see, with utter clarity, a majestic wedge-tailed eagle taking off in front of us from the side of the road. It will remain with me forever.

So a sound that typifies a rainy American city reminds me of something uniquely Australian. It’s a paradox that explains why I love music, and why it endures.