About that song

So, I got the CD the other day, by the way. It IS the song (the acoustic version) that I recall so vividly from my misspent youth!!

Of course, it’s not quite as perfectly good as my memory made it out to be. In fact, listening to it in the wee hours of the morning full of anticipation as I did, the experience would have been downright anticlimactic. Fortunately I’m generally optimistic enough that that sort of thing didn’t happen. It is, indeed, still the song that stuck with me all these years, so I can feel that there has been a circle closed, an achievement made, a longing filled in my life. Huzzah.

Song of the moment: "Ridin'," Chamillionaire
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A song that struck like lightning

If you have access to music, you probably know what I mean. Every now and then you come across a song that sticks with you. Sometimes it’s just because it’s catchy, even if the song’s not that good (like the theme from Diff’rent Strokes), or because it really speaks to you – again, whether the song’s popular or not.

For me, for example, songs like this include Jethro Tull’s “Requiem” and “Black Satin Dancer,” Evanescence’s “Going Under,” Jay-Z’s “Dig a Hole,” Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine,” Tom Waits’s “Telephone Call from Istanbul,” Drowning Pool’s “Tear Away,” and Curve’s “Chainmail,” among many others.

But sometimes there’s a song that does more than just stick. It lodges deep in the core of your being, caught and fused there by some strange, unreasonable resonance, only to arise unbidden at the strangest of times. It comes to you like that face in the crowd that you could swear was your high-school crush, or like the smell of your favorite relative’s homemade whatever that just stops you in your tracks. Songs like truly haunt you, and they don’t come along very often; now that I’m on the far side of 30, I’m glad to say I have a couple under my belt.