How do you memorize all those different songs?

As sidemen who work with a lot of different songwriters we may play with intermittently, we have to learn about a dillion tunes and be able to remember them after maybe months of not playing them at all. While learning them or conjuring them up after a whiIe, I have a few tricks I use to make them stick in my brainz:

1. If it's a song I play a lot, I learn the lyrics. It helps keep the form in order eg when the choruses come, when the bridge happens, when the song is over. I learned about fifty hundred jazz standards this way. They're all basically about sex, btw.

2. Liken the song I'm learning to another song, whether by riffs, chord changes or what the drums are doing. Sometimes I'll decide a ballad sounds like an old punk rock song or a rocker reminds me of a motive from a classical piece and I'll use that as my point of departure. I usually remember where the song deviates from the song in my head, avoiding actually playing the wrong song. Usually.

3. Sometimes it takes good old repetition. I listen to the song over and over and over and over and over and over until I am f*cking sick with it and it plagues me while I sleep, when I wake up to pee, poach eggs, or onstage while playing other songs with other people. These are the times I wish I was dead.

No, but seriously...