It's weird how bits of music get attached to particular memories, and most significantly, for me, to specific texts. It's not always a matter of, "that's what I was listening to when I read X." Of course, sometimes it is, too. Peter Gabriel's track "Mercy Street" was playing as I read the concluding paragraphs of Cien Años de Soledad, and whenever I hear that song, I inevitably think of that book. More broadly, Cat Stevens' Tea for the Tillerman album will always, strangely, connect with LeGuin's Earthsea novels, because that album was on heavy rotation when I read those novels way back in junior high. Tracks of New Order and Depeche Mode moodily — appropriately, perhaps — evoke Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, as I had those on my playlist (at that time a cassette-playing walkman clone of some kind) when I was reading those very "heavy" books during my complex, often very depressed time serving in the US Army, and stationed at Camp Edwards in Paju, Korea.
Perhaps more peculiar are the connections between Kraftwerk or the Psychadelic Furs and Shakespeare and Melville. But such connections are really solid, because altogether they represent my second year in college, when I was flirting with being an English major. Still other evocations are downright bizarre, and less direct. I almost always think of Jose Donoso when I hear Silvio Rodriguez's Playa Giron album, but the connection is basically because of the song "Santiago," which connects on subject matter to my 1994 visit (a winter week in August — Southern Hemisphere, remember?) in Santiago. I was reading Donoso, despite the fact that I didn't have any kind of sound track with me at the time.
Perhaps the strangest evocation hit me today, as I was walking to work in the pouring rain. Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans" played on my MP3, and I thought of Ayn Rand. That's just plain crazy… but it happens every single time. I also tend to think about the murals of Diego Rivera. The connection is actually rather abstract – it's not like I was listening to Arlo Guthrie as I read Atlas Shrugged, all those years ago when I was living in Mexico City. I think it's got to do with the sort of populist (anti-intellectualist?) "exaltation of the hard-working craftsman" that thematically unifies those artists, despite their stunning ideological differences.