The same song can become attached to completely unrelated lives across the world.

A piece of music has no fixed meaning. It gets bonded to whatever was happening the first time it landed on someone, so the same three minutes are a wedding to one person, a hospital corridor to another, and a long drive at nineteen to a third. The song is a container, and thousands of unrelated lives have poured entirely different things into it.

When a song hits you hard, notice that you are mostly hearing your own history come back. It is worth knowing that the people around you are carrying their own attachments to the same sounds. Ask someone what a song means to them sometime, since the answer is never what you would guess.