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Music

The Track That Became One of Luke Solomon's Closest Companions

How personal loss and memories of a carefree youth shaped Luke Solomon's selection for Heartbreakers

In the Heartbreakers series, we look at the dance floor tearjerkers that make your night special, whether that's at the height of your high or the plateau. Electronic music has the power to break hearts and this is an appreciation of those songs.

The majority of my favourite records are also the ones that fill me with uncontrollable emotion, consisting purely of the feeling created by the song itself, my connection to the lyrics and the moment in time I heard it first. Then I find that the song starts to become a part of my life - it's a song you want to play to people. You want them to feel the same emotion you feel. It's a bonding thing: something almost indescribable.

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As the song starts to travel through time - travel the world, meet more people – its significance snowballs as more and more memories become attached to it. I guess this is how the song eventually reaches classic status but that classic status means something completely unique to all the different people who listen to and experience the record in different settings and at different times in their lives.

The song I have chosen very much followed this path for me.

'Close' gave me goose bumps when I first heard it. This was compounded by the fact that Chez Damier was, and still is, a very close friend, so immediately I felt this deep connection to the track.

It appeared at a time when I was young, carefree even, but also going through a period of loss, so emotions were riding high. The song spoke to me, we connected and it became a friend: a very close friend that would help me through both happy and sad times.

15 years or so later I still listen to the song and I can still vividly relive all of those emotions as though it was yesterday, but over time those emotions have somehow become more intense, the passing years magnifying the record's effect on me.

I feel an overwhelming wave of both happiness and sadness listening to it now. I miss my youth dearly. I miss the days of feeling young and carefree; I miss all of the people I have lost along the way. But at the same time I feel so incredibly happy that the record exists, that I have been able to share it with friends and strangers alike. It makes me happy that I can attach so many joyous memories to what amounts to six minutes worth of sound and words.

It makes me marvel at the force that music has and how it can be such an important and necessary part of people's lives, identities and ultimately their memories.

Luke Solomon's new compilation, Unfinished Business Volume 2, is out October 26th on Classic.