“The thing a fish is least likely to understand,” someone once said, “is the water in which it swims.” The water in which people swim is in our own experience. Not everybody feels the same meaning when we listen to a song. As not all of us think that black is a great color. Most of the people judges differently, and that is one of the characteristics that this country has, everybody can express their opinion. Everybody has their own past, we have good and bad memories and they will be with us until the day that we leave this world.

These three songs present the same idea of a painful experience from the past. We have, “Fire Maple Song” by Everclear, “Easier to Run” by Linkin Park, and finally “My Immortal” by Evanescence. These songs have something in common, and that is that they present the idea of pain, a memory and the past, however they show these points of view differently and with dissimilar phases.

First we have the song from Everclear. This group plays popular music from the southern United States named country music. The author in this song illustrates in the following way a painful memory and then a story from his experience.

They talked about a damage that we can’t escape from. It will be always with us even if we do not want that hole in our heart, “turn away from the pain you don’t want, turning down to avoid them when they call.”

In the same paragraph we can find that they remember something, and want to live again that memory, “words I heard a long long time ago, want to go back to a summer time.” We can live again the memory when we remember it, and feel the experience that we had.

Then the author refers to his knowledge that he knew from the past, “I knew more than twenty years ago, sit beneath the sheets, had underneath the maple tree.” The past is going to be always part of our live. May be we forget it sometimes, but never easer it from the bottom of our heart.

During the rest of the song, the author tells a story. First when he is with his lover and her grandma under the maple tree. They are talking, smiling and listening to her grandma sing country music. Then the time past, and the scenario change, the author lives alone. Sometimes he calls her, special in holidays. At the end of the story the author receives a letter. He found out that the girl died, he feels bad, and he has the feeling of going back to the maple tree where everything starts.

For our next song, the second one is from another group Linkin Park. This group of five people plays and sings rock music which is a kind of loud music. It has a strong beat using instrument such as electric guitars and drums. They present the idea in a different order, the pain, themselves and the memory, hope, the past, and the reality.

The group expresses their idea of agony directly as “replacing this pain with something numb, it’s so much easier to go, that face all this pain here all alone.” It is not easy to fight with our fear without support.

Listening to the song we can hear that someone take away from the singer something important very deep inside of him. And this memory brings to his mind over and over again, “they never go away, like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they’ve played.”

The singer wishes he could change the past, and erase the pain that doesn’t let him goes, “sometimes I remember, the darkness of my past, bringing back these memories, I wish I didn’t have.” The author says and understands that it is not that simple to change something highly painful in our heart from the past.

At the last, the third song that we have is from a different group Evanescence. This group, as Linkin Park, plays rock music, however this group plays this song with a different beat. They show the song with a smooth melody without strong beat. She explains it in the following way, the pain is with her in her memory; she repeats that the pain becomes part of her life as she says “still have all of me”; the experience from the past, and then the reality that it is not that simple to get easier, she is going to live with the memory.

The singer shows in her song her present feeling of pain that does not leave her, “suppressed by all of my childish fears,” and the author repeat few times that this damage is a struggle for her in, “these wounds won’t seem to heal this pain is just too real.” The true is that it is hard to erase, and it has been with her all the time. She aspirates that it disappear from her life, if it wants to leave her, even if it does not.

This feeling comes from her memory, which appears again and again in her thoughts, “because your presence still lingers here, and it won’t leave me alone,” and “your face it haunts my once pleasant dreams, your voice it chased away all the sanity in me”.

Her past won’t go away, even if it past one thousand years, “you used to captivate me, by your resonating light, but now I’m bound by the life you left behind.” All the reality that the author presents is that every part of this painful experience long time ago has became part of her.

In all of this, they are many way to express sad memories. With different type of music, whether with rock, pop, country, soul, jazz, hip-hop, or rap. It will be always the same message. We need to remember that not everybody believes in the same feeling for the songs. These songs have something in common, however may be for other people they would not agree with me about these songs. Everybody has a different life, with different past and experiences.