Some works don’t end. They echo. “Apes Ma” and “Fitter Happier” gave us the edge of language, the moment just after sense unravels. But what follows? What lingers in the silence after the static? What shapes itself in the quiet? Memory. Not the nostalgic kind. Not warmth. Something stranger. Something inherited. Every time I hear “New Rose”, Dave, I salute you, brother.

Some songs don’t mourn. They remember. Quietly. Not with wailing or resolution, but with flickers, ghost gestures, unfinished lines, the weight of presence where no one stands. “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” doesn’t ask you to grieve; it dares you to accept absence. “Trans Am” doesn’t process loss, it lets a machine drift through it, slow and searching, headlights dimmed by grief.

This is a reflection on memory as transmission. On songs that remember for us. On the dead not as lost, but as companions, unseen, but never absent. They live in us, not only in grief, but in gesture, voice, and love. We are not the keepers of their stories. We are the continuation. The vehicle. The song is still playing.

Contents

Johnny Thunders’ ”You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”

Johnny Thunders sang it raw, already fading, already gone:

“You can’t put your arms around a memory / Don’t try.”

But we do try. And maybe that’s the point—not the impossibility, but the persistence. Even when they’ve left us, the lost are not gone. They’re echoed in gesture, in tone, in the odd turns of phrase we find ourselves repeating without quite knowing why.

We become their instrument.

Neil Young’s ”Trans Am”

If Thunders gave us punk’s exhausted lament, Neil Young, on Sleeps with Angels, gave us the cyber-ballad “Trans Am”—a song that disguises grief as a conversation between a machine and a fading memory.

“She used to work in a diner / Never saw a woman look finer…”

It starts like a car commercial, slips into a dream, and ends somewhere beyond reach—where technology tries to recreate feeling and falls short, beautifully. “Trans Am” is a ghost ride. A song wrapped in chrome and melancholy. A robot playing a love song to the past and not knowing why it hurts.

Thunders moans; Young drifts. But both are reckoning with memory as a thing you cannot hold. Not physically. But you can carry it.

Memory as Transmission

There are names that never really leave you. Not just because they linger in memory, but because you carry them, deliberately, and sometimes heavily. I try not to, maybe, but I do. It feels like a kind of sacred duty. Not performative. Not dramatic. Just part of the weight I wear. It’s tied up in my Catholicism, whether I want it or not, part of the cross I shoulder. Dave “Syd” Davies (O’Nions), Anne Marie, Richard Martin, Jessica Burke, and all my friends, family, and colleagues who’ve gone now. They’re not just influences or echoes. They are names I say inwardly, responsibilities I feel. They are part of my voice. Not as background radiation, but as a presence I answer to. Rightly or wrongly.

Songs That Remember For Us

Some songs remember for us. They don’t offer resolution or comfort, but they mirror what remembering feels like: scattered, fractured, never in order. “Apes Ma” is barely audible, a mutter from the back of the mind. “Fitter Happier” is numbness, structured like a checklist but hollowed out by despair. “Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” aches, not because it grieves, but because it refuses to lie about what grief becomes. And “Trans Am”, Neil Young’s strange mechanical elegy feels like a machine trying to process something it was never designed to hold. These tracks don’t explain anything. They haunt. In doing so, they echo how memory works.

Coda

The dead are not behind us. They’re not gone in any final sense. They linger, not as ghosts, but as obligations, as traces in our tone, as moments we return to whether we want to or not. I don’t carry them by accident. I carry them because I must. Because something in me won’t let go, and maybe shouldn’t. They shape the way I walk through the world. Not always visible, but always present. Sometimes, when a song plays or a sentence forms in a certain rhythm, I can feel them close. Not watching. Not judging. Just there. The veil isn’t thick. And memory is never truly silent.