Music as Memory and Emotional Release in Same As It Ever Was: Symbol Analysis
The Many Lives of a Song in Julia Ames's World
Music in Same As It Ever Was is not a single recurring object but a pervasive sensory language that Julia Ames uses to navigate, remember, and sometimes escape her own life. Songs and albums appear at nearly every pivotal moment in the novel—from the kitchen dances of Julia's childhood to the car rides with her young son, from the Fleetwood Mac records that soundtrack her affair with Nathaniel to the wedding reception where she dances with her grown children. The novel treats music as a kind of emotional archive: a way of storing feelings that Julia cannot otherwise articulate, and a trigger that can return her to past selves whether she wants to go or not.
Music as a Bridge Between Generations
The most immediate way music functions in the novel is as connective tissue between Julia and her children. In the opening chapter, driving home from her unexpected encounter with Helen Russo, Julia switches from public radio to one of her daughter Alma's playlists. The playlist is a deliberate act of reaching toward her teenage daughter—she has taught herself to appreciate the contemporary music Alma favors, constantly and desperately scrambling for her daughter to love her, even though she admits she does not fully understand it. The playlist becomes a shared language, a way for Julia to feel close to a daughter who is otherwise sullen and distant.
This gesture echoes backward to Julia's relationship with her son Ben. In the same passage, Julia remembers playing her CDs much louder than she does now while driving Ben to preschool or on their daily adventures around town. Music was the medium of her early motherhood—the way she shared herself with her children before they were old enough for conversation. When Ben asks to skip school in Chapter 2, Julia takes him into the city where they listen to music together, making the shared listening an act of rebellion and intimacy.
The generational bridge runs in both directions. Alma's alarm clock is a clip from the Ramones' 'Blitzkrieg Bop' that blares on a violent loop, and Alma wears her mother's old Jesus and Mary Chain shirt from a show at the Aragon—an early date with Mark. The shirt is described as a private emblem of their life before any of the grout was laid, suggesting that music and its artifacts carry the weight of Julia's pre-marital identity. When Alma wears it, she is unknowingly carrying her mother's history.
The Kitchen Dances: Music and Maternal Love
The novel's most tender music scenes belong to Julia's childhood with her mother Anita. In Chapter 56, Julia recalls a domestic routine in which her mother would come home from work and the two of them would begin preparing a recipe together, and music would often prompt them to dance in the kitchen. They danced to full albums—The Supremes A' Go-Go, Runaround Sue, Hunky Dory—and when Julia was small, Anita would lift her into her arms. On one occasion, Anita raised Julia into the air and pressed her face to Julia's stomach, and Julia felt wholly loved.
This memory is significant because it stands as the novel's clearest evidence of warmth between Julia and her mother. The kitchen dances represent a period when Anita was present and loving, before the family's abrupt departure from their house on Washtenaw, before Anita's drinking and the parade of men, before the revelation about Julia's father. The music is the container for this lost tenderness.
But the passage also carries loss. Julia cannot remember the last time they danced together—they stopped at some point, but she could not recall which time was the final one. She continued dancing alone afterward, and she has always wondered whether her mother did the same. The question of whether Anita kept dancing alone becomes a question about whether Anita ever loved Julia the way Julia loved her. Music, here, is both the proof of love and the evidence of its disappearance. This connects to the novel's broader exploration of mother-daughter bonds marked by estrangement and reconciliation.
Music as the Soundtrack of Betrayal
Music also marks the novel's most morally complicated terrain. In Chapter 12, Julia's affair with Nathaniel unfolds to the sound of Fleetwood Mac. The music is intimate and seductive—she lets herself melt into the Russos' sofa as songs play—but it also produces jarring interruptions. When the song changes to 'Don't Stop,' it makes Julia think very unpleasantly of Bill Clinton, a moment of absurdist deflation that punctures the romantic haze. The juxtaposition suggests that the affair's soundtrack is not purely romantic; it is also ridiculous, uncomfortable, and self-deceiving.
Julia's joke about the Doors—that every Doors song is exactly the same because the band just made one and rereleased it with slight modifications hundreds of times—is a moment of flirtatious charm, but it also carries a darker resonance. The repetition of the same song, over and over, mirrors the repetitive pattern of Julia's affair: the same visits, the same kisses, the same self-justifications. The joke is funny, but it is also a confession. The affair itself is part of the novel's exploration of the long shadow of infidelity on a marriage.
Music, Memory, and Grief
In the novel's final chapters, music becomes the primary vehicle for grief. At Ben's wedding, Julia recognizes the processional as one of Alma's maudlin indie bands, and the first dance is set to the Rolling Stones' 'Waiting on a Friend.' The song triggers a cascade of memories: Julia and Mark dancing to 'I Just Want to Make Love to You' at their own wedding twenty-five years earlier, and the early dates when Julia quizzed Mark about his favorite Talking Heads song, insisting there was a right answer. Music is the thread that connects these moments across decades.
After Mark's death, Julia's memories of the wedding become a kind of internal soundtrack. She will remember the moments when she turns on an album he disliked or one he loved—the act of playing music becoming a way of conjuring his presence. The albums become relics, objects of grief. When Alma returns from Accra and wears her father's gray pullover and, once, her mother's faded teal Jesus and Mary Chain T-shirt, the clothing itself becomes a kind of music—a material echo of the songs and shows that defined Julia's youth.
The novel's final image of the wedding dance—Julia in Ben's arms, Alma twirling on Mark's raised hand, the song 'Got the wings of heaven on my shoes' playing—is described as a memory Julia will return to repeatedly in the time she has left. Music, in the end, is what makes memory bearable. It is the thing that can be replayed, the thing that can be returned to, the thing that survives. This connects to the novel's meditation on the passage of time and the unreliability of memory and the impossibility of outrunning one's history.
Study Questions
1. How does the novel use music to connect Julia to her children across generations?
The novel uses music as a shared language between Julia and her children. Julia listens to Alma's playlist in the car, deliberately teaching herself to appreciate contemporary music while desperately scrambling for her daughter to love her. She played her CDs loudly for Ben during his preschool years, and their city adventure in Chapter 2 involves listening to music together. Alma's alarm is a Ramones clip, and she wears Julia's old Jesus and Mary Chain shirt—a private emblem of Julia's pre-marital life. Music is the medium through which Julia tries to reach her children and through which her history is passed to them, sometimes without their knowing.
2. What does the kitchen-dancing memory reveal about Julia's relationship with her mother?
The kitchen dances in Chapter 56 are the novel's clearest evidence of warmth between Julia and Anita. They danced to full albums—The Supremes, Runaround Sue, Hunky Dory—and Anita would lift Julia into her arms, once pressing her face to Julia's stomach so that Julia felt wholly loved. But the memory is also marked by loss: Julia cannot remember the last time they danced, and she has always wondered whether her mother continued dancing alone. The passage suggests that music was the one reliable channel of maternal love, and its disappearance mirrors the broader breakdown of their relationship. This connects to the novel's exploration of maternal ambivalence and the fear of repeating one's mother's mistakes.
3. How does music function differently in the affair with Nathaniel than in Julia's marriage to Mark?
Music in the affair is ambient and seductive—Fleetwood Mac playing while Julia and Nathaniel kiss on the Russos' sofa—but it is also deflated by absurd interruptions, like 'Don't Stop' making Julia think of Bill Clinton. Julia's joke about the Doors being one song rereleased hundreds of times hints at the repetitive, self-deceiving quality of the affair. By contrast, music in Julia's marriage is participatory and meaningful: she and Mark went to shows every weekend, she could recite the Pavement discography, and she quizzed him about his favorite Talking Heads song on an early date. The contrast suggests that music in the marriage represents genuine connection, while music in the affair is a backdrop for avoidance.
4. Why does the novel return to music so insistently in the chapters after Mark's death?
After Mark dies, music becomes the primary vehicle for Julia's grief. She remembers the wedding moments when she turns on an album he disliked or one he loved—the act of playing music becoming a way of conjuring his presence. The albums become relics, and the wedding dance becomes a memory she will replay repeatedly in the time she has left. Music is the one thing that can be replayed, the one thing that survives the people who loved it. The novel uses music to suggest that memory itself is a kind of song—something that can be returned to, even when the person who shared it is gone.