Songs as shared memories

Songs as shared memories link Henry Page’s growing intimacy with Grace Town to the grief and history attached to Dom. The Strokes recur as a favorite band, a marker on an inherited car, a song that becomes “our song,” and a name among the belongings Grace eventually releases. Music offers Henry and Grace a way to recognize one another, but its meanings are layered: what sounds like Henry’s taste may belong to Dom’s past, and what feels shared can still rest on unequal knowledge.

A song as a private association

When asked to name a song that made him feel something, Henry chose “Someday” by The Strokes. His answer was bound to a particular memory: falling asleep while Grace’s favorite band played in the background. The song therefore carried an association before Grace and Henry named it between them. It brought together Henry’s awareness of her tastes and a quiet moment he remembered, making music a storehouse for feeling that had not yet become an openly acknowledged relationship.

Their conversation also reveals that The Strokes are not simply Henry’s independent discovery. Grace notices the band’s decals on his car, its image on his key ring, and its place as his phone background. Henry explains that a friend loved the band and that the car is the friend’s old car. The apparent signs of personal fandom thus point toward an inherited connection. Later evidence identifies the friend with Dom: music and its associated objects let Dom remain present in Henry’s surroundings, even while Henry is beginning to make memories with Grace.

From favorite song to “our song”

At Heslin’s party, a cover of “Someday” begins playing and Grace calls it “our song.” Henry is surprised that she remembers his favorite song and more surprised that she describes it as belonging to both of them. The shift from his song to their song gives the track a new, relational meaning; it does not erase the earlier memory of Grace’s favorite band, but layers that memory with a moment of recognition between them.

Grace takes Henry’s hand and leads him onto the makeshift dance floor, the hardwood floor of the living room. Her dancing seems unlike the reserved version of her that Henry knows, and he sees, briefly, the girl suggested by her earlier Facebook photographs. She tells him he is not dancing, takes his hand again, and draws him into the movement. Henry wants to kiss her while the song plays and finally dances with her, but Lola Leung arrives with Georgia before he acts on that wish. The track becomes a record of both closeness and interruption: it carries the promise Henry feels in the moment, not a completed declaration or kiss.

Music among Dom’s traces

The Strokes motif also complicates Henry’s sense of who he is approaching. Dom’s room contains a record player and stacks of old vinyl among the familiar clutter of a teenage boy’s life. The room’s objects present Dom as a person rather than only as a lost rival or an abstract memory. In that context, the band’s appearance on Henry’s car and key ring is more than decoration: it is part of a material connection to the friend whose old car Henry drives.

Grace’s visits to Dom’s grave form another kind of musical remembrance. Henry and his friends see her kneeling among flowers, lying on her stomach in the grass, and moving her lips as if talking or perhaps singing to the person beneath the earth. The scene is intensely private, and Sadie Page insists that they leave rather than claim a moment not meant for them. No particular song is identified there; what matters is that music belongs to the possible forms of address Grace uses in her continuing conversation with Dom.

Later, in the abandoned train station’s pool, Grace releases objects from a small metal box associated with Dom’s shrine. The Strokes keychain and Dom’s Ramones T-shirt go into the water alongside an anchor necklace; the box itself, marked “DOM GRADE 10,” sinks last. The band-related keepsakes make music part of the material history she is letting go of, piece by piece. The release does not demonstrate that memory has vanished: Henry subsequently finds fresh flowers at Dom’s grave and realizes Grace never stopped visiting. Instead, the contrast distinguishes relinquishing particular relics from ending remembrance.

Recollection, idealization, and change

Music also shapes the way Henry remembers Grace. In retrospect, he pictures an idealized version of her humming The Pixies and The Strokes as they slow-dance beneath string lights, a version he had imagined helping to put back together. The image gives their shared musical language the glow of a romantic scene, but Henry’s reflection places it among the many versions of Grace he has assembled in his mind. The motif therefore carries a tension: a song can make a moment feel mutual and enduring, while the memory built around it may still idealize the person who was there.

Their messages offer a smaller, everyday form of cultural exchange. Grace sends Henry an unsolicited personal message asking about the previous night’s performance of The Lion King, an outing he had mentioned only once. Their conversation turns to the production’s added songs and changed musical details, mixing criticism with jokes and continuing into newspaper business. This exchange is not another shared song in the same sense as “Someday,” but it shows how remembered details and musical talk can sustain a private channel between them. Across these episodes, songs and music-related objects do not resolve grief or guarantee a lasting romance. They make connections perceptible, preserve traces of the dead, and allow a new intimacy to grow inside meanings already carried from the past.