When I was writing my book last year, I became interested in two types of nostalgia that come under what I consider to be ‘personal nostalgia’ – songs that are nostalgic to us – but maybe not others. They are called ‘anticipated’ and ‘anticipatory’ nostalgia. With the former, you foresee yourself looking back on events that have not yet happened and expect to feel nostalgic for them – for example the thought of moving to a new city, missing the old one and believing you will experience regret. Anticipatory nostalgia on the other hand is related to missing what has not yet been lost or missing the present prematurely before it has become past. Although the actual event one is nostalgic about has not happened in both instances, in anticipated nostalgia one expects to be nostalgic in the future, with anticipatory nostalgia you experience the emotion now—you are nostalgic for the place you are leaving despite the fact you still live there and have not yet moved! 

I was going to start looking for well known tracks that had been written with these influences- but then I realized I had actually experienced it myself. I wrote the piece ‘Going Away’ a couple of weeks before going away on my first tour with the James Taylor Quartet. I had just got married and knew I was going to miss my wife when I was away – this piece just ‘popped out’ one lunch break when I was teaching guitar in a school in North London. I actually got the opportunity to record it for Polydor records in 1990 – but I recently started to experiment with it on solo guitar – which is what you can hear below. It is only the theme – but it is a piece that was influenced by what can only be described as ‘nostalgia of the future’.