The Songs You Still Need to Find
on moths to "Bright Lights"
On January 31, 2025, I heard the song “Bright Lights” by Matchbox Twenty for the first time in nearly twenty years. I was standing in my living room with my headphones on, and when the chorus began, 35 seconds into the song, I burst into tears1.
For those unfamiliar with Matchbox Twenty, the band made early-aughts alternative rock that usually bordered on singer-songwriter pop. In my mind, Matchbox Twenty has always been a guy band (which is for women), which is different from a boy band, which is for girls2. They reentered the zeitgeist two years ago, when Ken serenaded Barbie with “Push”.
My mom has loved Matchbox Twenty—and their frontman Rob Thomas—for my entire life.
I asked her about it recently on the phone—how would she listen to music when I was a baby? How did my young brain soak up her favorite songs? She told me that she kept a CD stereo in the kitchen, and that she probably would’ve played music on it whenever she was cleaning or doing laundry. She told me that music was around often, but that it was a pain to change the CDs—that it makes sense that I would remember just a handful of her favorite albums from that time.
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“Bright Lights” was released in 2003, and in 2003, I was a toddler. Until January 31, I had forgotten the song existed.
And then, the other night, something compelled me to go through the early albums of Matchbox Twenty. I was in a rut and I wanted different-but-familiar music—it was an evening like any other, except it wasn’t, because I was listening to Matchbox Twenty’s third album, More Than You Think You Are, from top to bottom. I was guided by the knowledge that my mom had loved them when I was a kid. I wasn’t listening for anything, I was just listening.
By track three, I was crying. It had been an entire adult lifetime, but I remembered that song. It was as if some part of me—a dormant mind from my younger life—had woken up upon hearing those opening piano chords. When I heard it, I knew it. I didn’t remember the lyrics, but I knew that I had heard them many times over before, a world ago. It was song that felt familiar to my bones. A song from a past life.
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Moths go through a metamorphosis process that “essentially turns their brains and bodies to soup” and yet “the caterpillar memories [survive] the biological meltdown”3.
The truth is, I don’t remember a single thing about 2003. I have fuzzy outlines of the house that I lived in at the time, but it’s hard to know if I have intrinsic memories of that place, or if I’ve just seen enough pictures to cobble together a vision of it in my head. I don’t remember my personality or my bedroom or the way I spent my hours. How much does who I was have in common with who I am today4? Maybe I’ll have a better sense of it if I ever have kids?
All I know is that I share a brain with me from 2003, and “Bright Lights” is proof. There are songs that little me heard over and over, and the same brain remembers them now. I really have been alive—in this body, in this mind.
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My mom told me a story about her old CD collection when I was home for Christmas.
Before she had gotten married, at some point in the 90s, my mom was moving to a new apartment and had asked her brother to help her move.
All of her CDs had been packed into a box, but when she put the box in the back of her brother’s pickup truck, she reorganized the discs to put her favorites albums at the very top. In her hypothetical scenario, my mom wanted anyone who might help carry her boxes to recognize her good taste in music—to know her music taste for the best of her collection.
Ten minutes into the drive, going 70 mph on a massive multi-lane Texas highway, her box of CDs flew open, and she watched from the rearview mirror as all of her favorite albums—the ones that she wanted to showcase most—flew out of the truck and onto the road, never to be seen again. She was devastated.
When she told me this story a few months ago, she was cracking up. Time had revealed the obvious humor of it all, and she did, in a sense, display her favorite discs to the world.
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So maybe we’re all just destined to lose things with time—songs from a past life, CDs on the highway, the smell of our grandmother’s cooking. We lose and we discover and we collect. And somewhere up there, way in the back, sometimes the voice will speak up, and the moth will remember.
Blah blah blah the song’s about a girl moving to New York City and her ex-boyfriend is like “the city’s going to chew you up and spit you out... you’re beautiful and wistful and I’ll be back home for you when your dreams die cuz I love you babe”. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE SONG. It is, but it isn’t!!! You get it.
Other guy bands? Train. Probably Coldplay. The 1975.
John Nielsen, “Study: Moths Can Remember Caterpillar Days,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/2008/03/10/88031220/study-moths-can-remember-caterpillar-days
Joshua Rothman has a great article about this in The New Yorker.