Some records evoke times of your life: Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind, the debut Smiths album, those records remind me with incredible vividness of a student bedsit in north Oxford, the yearnings and miseries of that time; "Thieves Like Us" carries with it the flush of romance remembered; there's plenty more examples....

But with most music, the memories carried are memories of the music itself, if that makes sense. When you're a music fiend, that function of commemoration or life-soundtracking or "our song" that perhaps remains prominent for the more casual listener, it really fades away. You might say that music's life eclipses your own, or it becomes one with it, or it fills in the holes. Music doesn't serve as a mirror for narcissistic identification so much as a means of leaving one's self behind. A favorite record, then, might be more like gazing at a landscape, the kind of place you'd revisit at different stages of your life. A perennial source of wonder. 

This is why I'm not a huge fan of memoiristic criticism: oh, it can be done well, but even at its best it doesn't really tell you anything about the music. That one individual's memories adhere to a piece of music in a particular fashion doesn't mean they inhere to it in a meaningfully transmissible way; my private significance is unlikely to signify to others, have any relation to what you or anybody else might glom onto the same record. 

Of course it's true that the narcissistic projection towards a song/album/group that music arouses so potently can make it feel like those life-experiences are somehow contained and distilled by the  music, that this is the music's purpose, why it exists.... We are self-centred creatures, after all.