This week and next, I’m counting down the songs I most associate with movies — tracks that immediately put me into a specific scene of a favorite film.

Most of these are songs I’d never heard before encountering them on the big screen, but yesterday’s SOTD and today’s are exceptions.

I’m not a huge Aerosmith fan, but I was familiar enough with ‘Sweet Emotion’ before seeing Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused. But after seeing the movie, I would never hear it the same way again.

The song plays over one of my favorite opening credits sequences in all of cinema. I can’t hear the building intro of ‘Sweet Emotion’ without picturing the Gramercy logo, and when the vocals kick in, I imagine that orange Pontiac GTO making a slow-mo arc through the high school parking lot.

Linklater then establishes his setting while introducing the film’s main characters in a series of quick shots that teleport us to 1976. He uses period songs memorably throughout the film, but this one sticks with me the most.

Here’s the opening credits sequence, and the full song is below.