Everything Is Broken — A Walkman Memory Across Borders

There are songs that don’t just stay in your ears — they travel with your life.

I first heard Everything Is Broken by Bob Dylan sometime around 1990.

https://youtu.be/pndhO5DcSI0?si=TGIqdc2oVDD1T8eB

 I bought the tape at A&B Sound in Surrey, after driving in from Abbotsford. Back then, that already felt like a journey — planning, fuel, time, intention. Music wasn’t something you clicked into; it was something you went out to get.

I took that cassette with me to Mexico.

It became the soundtrack to long train rides and bus rides — the kind where the landscape slowly dissolves into dust, wires, fields, small stations, and waiting. A Walkman, cheap headphones, rewinding the tape with a pencil or finger when it got eaten or tangled — that whole physical ritual is part of the memory now.

The song itself is built like a list of fractures:

Broken nights, broken days
Broken leaves on broken trees
Broken treaties, broken vows...

Everything named in pieces. Nothing held together.

At the time, I don’t think I was trying to analyze it. I was just absorbing it. But looking back, it feels like it matched the feeling of travel in a developing awareness of the world — not just seeing beauty, but also seeing how many systems, people, and promises don’t quite hold.

Long-distance travel has a way of doing that. Hours stretch. Sleep breaks apart. Conversations disappear. You sit with your own thoughts and the movement of the world outside the window. The song becomes a kind of companion to that state — not comforting exactly, but honest in a way that feels steady.

What stays with me now isn’t just the lyrics or the melody. It’s the physicality of it all: the cassette tape, the Walkman clipped somewhere on my body, the road between Abbotsford and Surrey, and then further — Mexico unfolding mile by mile.

Music used to be something you carried.

Not in a phone. In your hands. In your luggage. In your memory.

And somehow, that made it last longer.

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Reflective Questions

• How has the way we listen to music changed the way we remember our lives?
• Do physical formats (tapes, CDs, records) make music feel more meaningful or permanent than streaming?
• What songs in your life are tied to travel, transition, or major life shifts?
• Has convenience made music more accessible but less memorable?
• When you think of a “soundtrack” to your life today, does it feel as grounded as it once did?
• What did long, uninterrupted listening time allow you to feel or process that modern listening might interrupt?

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