On the fourth of July my mother would take my brother and me to watch the fireworks behind the technical college near our house. The year I was umbilically attached to my Walkman, probably one of the last years we sat and watched the fireworks as a family, the sun was setting on the 90s and most people I knew spent their allowance on CDs. I didn’t get an allowance but the radio was free. As it got dark and we waited for the show to begin over the treeline I listened to “So Far Away” on a cassette of songs I’d taped off the radio. When it was over I’d rewind the tape and begin the song again.

Nostalgia has its roots in the word “homesickness.” It smashes together the Latin words for “return home” and “pain.” Nowhere in its definition does it mention the brothers Knopfler.

An album directed at the early CD-buying market, Brothers in Arms was the first album to sell a million copies on CD, which became the primary medium of my own music consumption until well into college. It is the very definition of pop music to people who were buying CDs at full price in 1985, and not engaging in primitive piracy or rooting through the used bins as I would come to do—that is, people who were the age I am now, caught between their first adult salary and some future moment when they’d have something more pressing to spend it on, someone to save it for. Young professionals with money to burn.

“Money for Nothing” was the Billboard #1 hit the day I was born. I want my MTV. Now the “M” in “MTV” doesn’t stand for anything.

Here I am again in this mean old town / And you’re so far away from me / Where are you when the sun goes down / You’re so far away from me. This song belongs in the pantheon of songs about rock musicians on tour. It shares its DNA with Journey’s “Faithfully” and Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.” So far away from me / So far I just can’t see. And yet my experience of the truncated version of the song that I wore out on my Walkman under the exploding Virginia sky was terrifying in its bigness, stultifying in its ability to create out of nothing a longing for longing. I didn’t have any sense of what it’s like to desire someone across a great distance, let alone how it feels to be a Knopfler on the road, and yet the gravity of that feeling was physical and delicious and without object. I missed, and was nostalgic for the feeling of missing.

In the 1980s, the British Phonographic Institute launched a campaign that insisted “Home Taping Is Killing Music (And It’s Illegal).” Referencing a precedent set in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., where the Supreme Court ruled that recording TV shows on Betamax constituted fair use, and in order to protect the rights of music listeners to tape whatever they wanted off the radio, the non-profit Home Recording Rights Coalition was founded. While the website HRRC.org still exists, their account has been suspended. The pirates have moved on to vaster, deeper seas.

My adolescence was generally unremarkable in that I could often be found in my room with my headphones on, trying to get as far away from home as possible. The #1 hits of the last 30 years were about as far as the radio could take me, and by pressing record I could acquire and hoard the ones I loved. We didn’t have cable so I never watched MTV. College and grad school were an embarrassing blur of pretending to have seen music videos I hadn’t seen, of gushing over hidden gem tracks I hadn’t heard. I’d spend long post-party cram sessions on YouTube so the next time these songs came up at the bar, I could say, and by a technicality truthfully, I remember.

Somewhere in our usage of the word nostalgia, a sense of longing for things past got involved. The further one is from the longed-for object in time, the more powerful the sentiment: at least, that seems to be the implication. This definition isn’t particularly helpful in understanding how the pace of progress can create a longing for the recent past, or how a longing for the past can be experienced by a child with no real past to speak of. How a person can come to own a thing she didn’t earn.

I’m watching the video for “So Far Away” in my office in the dark—something I’ve somehow never done—and it bums me out. I hate that they’re smiling. I hate their over-zealous, skinny white guy swagger. They look like the rock ‘n’ roll caricatures their caricature of a blue collar worker is on about in the album’s second track, the ones getting all that money for nothing and those chicks for free. This video is the very definition of something that hasn’t “aged well” though it is, as I am, only 30 years old.

When Brothers in Arms came out, Rykodisc, the label that released it, couldn’t get CDs manufactured fast enough to meet the worldwide demand. I still have all my CDs but I no longer have a way to play them.

If I could define nostalgia I’d say it’s the precise feeling I have when “So Far Away” gets to the part where the radio version would’ve faded out but because it’s years later and I’m a grown-ass(ish) woman streaming the album version on Spotify the song continues its slow fade for another minute and a half. Still I know where that moment is and where it would have been, it’s in my body and it feels like the fourth of July.

Perhaps a secondary definition would be that nostalgia is the phenomenon of living in two moments at once: the present moment, and a more distant moment that, with the help of some stolen triggering agent, some ancient tension belonging not to you but to the vast network of souls that came before, comes back to inflict itself on the present.

This year I’ve been listening almost exclusively and inexplicably to records that were released the year I was born, albums I had no contemporaneous experience of, and yet somehow feel gravitationally drawn to, as if they belong in some way to a collection of events that make up my life. Maybe this is an attempt to run into the arms of a long-lost parent, to root out an empirical connection I have to these albums that was forged on the day I was born and that will bridge some perceived gap in my history. To provide evidence of some kind of lineage, another home to return to, to run away from. To explain what I’m missing when I’m missing nothing.

What remains unstated about nostalgia and its authenticity is the importance of ownership: that what’s lost to you in time must, at some distant point, have been yours. Brothers in Arms hit the syndicated airwaves and splintered into millions of pieces. Some of those pieces found their way to me years later as shrapnel, collateral, long-delayed derivatives of the original. What keeps me returning to that July evening in Virginia in my childhood has nothing to do with Dire Straits. I can’t miss Brothers in Arms because it isn’t missing. What’s lost and therefore longed for is how I’d hover over the stereo as the radio DJ’s voice disappeared beneath the swell of those first familiar notes, anxiously waiting to press record.

—Laura Eve Engel