A familiar song can restore the age at which its words first seemed written for you.

Songs store the age you were. A few bars return the whole configuration, the room, the certainty, the feeling that the words had been written with you specifically in mind, which is how music works on the young. You are not remembering the song so much as briefly reoccupying a self that no longer exists.

It is worth letting that happen rather than treating it as sentimentality. And it is worth being generous about whatever a younger person is currently playing on repeat, since they are laying down the same thing. The music is a container for something that will matter to them for decades.