As the final week closes in on me, everything comes together: I’m trying to sleep less just so I have more time– more time for drinking, more time for Paris (for all those last minute things I left too late), more time for friends. With that, and the more scared I get of leaving this place, I’m probably going to throw a barrage of various ‘last minute’ posts at you about life in Paris (and maybe a random Amsterdam one in there, too). In the last week my Ipod decides, you could say, to go on a little hiatus, so it makes sense to do one a little different today: the music on my exchange. It might seem kind of silly to do one based on music– after all, this is talking about things that might have very little to do with places like Paris itself. But music is very important to me: it has a way of capturing moments the way writing or pictures can’t; I already know which songs are going to bring me back, recreate the scene like I don’t even need to be there. These are those songs:

It’s much easier to talk about the music that I listened to in places that weren’t Paris, as those places were one time-affairs, easy to separate into weeks, and each album really seemed to capture things. When I woke up on the plane towards Ireland and got my first glimpse of the green below, I started listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland, which opens with a song whose chorus goes “these are the days of miracle and wonder”. Indeed. In middle England the National’s Trouble Will Find Me was pretty ideal for the thoughtful misty green, while conversely the hip and fast urbanism of Discosure’s awesome dance album Settle was perfect for London (especially hopping tubes). In Spain I listened to a lot of different things, but I think the music that managed to best capture Barcelona and Madrid (my favorites) was MIA’s album Kala— the vibrant ethnic hip hop was perfect for those sweaty nights which seemed to stick to you. Then again, while listening to the radio on the road, the radio stations never stopped playing Avicii’s “Wake Me Up”. And as cheesy as it is, that song’s pretty damn fitting too: “wake me up when it’s all over, when I’m wiser and older”– so kickback and enjoy the exchange.

Paris is more difficult; I mean, if one style or collection was able to capture everything I’d done this term, I’d done something wrong. Instead, with this city, there’s so many different neighborhoods, so different in such different times, with so many things to love about it. Probably one of my favorite genres the past four months has been that kind of electro that makes you think probably a little more than it makes you dance– albums like Air’s Moon Safari and Daft Punk’s new one (both French bands) are good references, though the youtube channel “the sound you need”, which remixes songs by slowing the tempo down to downright meditative speeds, is probably best. I think I got so into the style here because it captures modern Paris: urban, electric, but still moving at a pace on its own, keeping it refined and giving lots of room for thought. Of course there’s the other side of this city: the shockingly rude, the honking horned devil of a city– the one with the people who will glare at you if you leave your house not dressed properly. For that, there’s always Kanye, and Yeezus goes particularly well. When I’m biking through this city in rush hour, there’s really nothing that slaps you into the angry speed of things like “black skinhead” or “new slaves”. And sometimes the city goes silent, when it’s just you, the lights, and the empty streets with houses older than any of your ancestors. For that side, Arcade Fire’s Reflektor album is pretty ideal, whose hollow sounds are perfect for that empty– yet still glittery night– and Win Butler’s husky preacher’s voice has always had something timeless about it. When I remember Paris I need to use all of them to remember it as it really was for me.

Most of this music is less than a year old; if I’d chosen to come here say next year I would already have listened those albums to death– already associate them with somewhere else– and I’d have new albums to “make Paris” for me. But then there’s the music that, like the city itself, never die, that go with the city as perfectly as the writings of Hemmingway or Baudelaire. There’s the impressionist music (Chopin, Debussy, Ravel) from the late 1800s that captures so perfectly that time of Paris everyone “remembers”, of lamplit boulevards, the artists, the cabarets, the city on the cutting edge of everything as much as it’s the height of class. Thanks to the rigorous belief in the myth of the Bell Epoque– the trying to keep everything as it was– it’s still so easy to see that these days. Meanwhile, everyone who’s doing an exchange in Paris (and many Parisians too) have the Amelie soundtrack on their Ipod– it’s the new myth of Paris. And Paris is the city, after all, where clichés aren’t clichés anymore; in the end it’s all about Edith. Seriously, if you ever question that French isn’t one of the most beautiful languages in the world, just listen to her. Her songs are like that third bottle of the wine as the bar clears out, or a cold night coming home and seeing the Eiffel Tower on the misty periphery. There’s a reason every accordionist in the metro or at Montmartre play her: she is Paris.

So whether it’s Chopin, Vance Joy’s “Riptide”, or– c’mon you know it– Miley Cyrus’s “We can’t stop”, my Paris playlist will become my musical museum, my soundtrack to my exchange. And maybe– just once in a while– it can bring me back.