...a couple of years ago, my girls had this song playing on a CD they'd made for a road trip we were making. Make that a tame road trip for Robin, with girl children in tow. They were maybe fifteen and nineteen at the time (now Robin Sr. is twenty-one, and The Blondster is about to turn seventeen on me).
So anyway, we were driving along and driving along, and I was listening to the words of this song, and after a minute or so, I realized that there was something close to a decade of my life being described in the words. Damn.
Some of it was good stuff, a lot of it was crap stuff, but crap or good or some nether-in-between-happening kind of a place, it was the time I felt most alive without pause.
Sometimes I was the drunken narrator waking up and wondering what the hell?, and sometimes I was the recipient of the hazy wake-up beg-for-forgiveness fuss fit. Either way, it was a strange world to live in. A decade long (actually, a little longer) trip down inside a separate place.
When I think about it now, it seems like I was a different person then.
So, when this song comes on now, and it does still come on occasionally, I smile and tell my younger daughter I just love the beat on that one, but really, I just love the mental pictures rolling through my consciousness as it lopes across my cells, ranting and rolling.
What songs bring singular times of your life back in focus?
Monday, April 13, 2009
So back when I was who I was before I turned into this version of me...
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5 comments:
I couldn't understand the words to this song, but that's okay. It doesn't make me love it any less.
Let's see . . . I think pretty much any Prince song brings back a good memory. Working in record shops in my youth and the friendships I forged from them kind of memories. And then of course there are all the bar songs . . .
This one always gets me.
Music seems to ally itself to feeling like s symbiotic ephemera-thang.
A couple of weeks ago I got hold of a Todd Rundgren album I used to listen to in the early 80s. When I played it again, it was all there, like I'd walked back into my old life for 40 minutes.
But...
I only ever had this on tape, and when my friend recorded it for me, he had to miss out a track to fit it on a C90. So when I got close to the end of the album, I was confronted by an alien song. In terms of sound and production, it matched the rest of the album perfectly, but as it held no meaning for me — hey, I'm guessing this is what having a phantom limb must be like. Very weird.
Then I wondered — what if my friend had missed off my favourite song instead of this one? Would this missing song have made it onto my hit list and been invested with supernatural powers?
Anyhow, here's one that's guaranteed to get me blubbing every time...
Well for me the music of Paul Simon has been a constant since my early teens - lyrically, musically - in every way it resonates with me. This is one of my favourites simply because of the physical and emotional response it engenders in me. When he sings "my soul rose unexpectedly" that's what I feel.
Then there's this one. More true now than ever.
Oh yeah, freddie. The bar songs. And the big bar speakers. or maybe the big speakers up on the stages were before your time? Christ. I hate saying that. If I don't look in a mirror, and anyone asks me how old I am, the voice in my head says '27'.
BT, I loved Smashing Pumpkins - never had heard more than a few songs, in all honesty, '1979' comes to mind. But I really liked this one - although I'm left wondering if the blonde chick in the video or the song itself is what always gets you? Just kidding, but only barely!
Cocteau Twins, Whirl?!! Me, too. i think the one I liked is called Blind Dumb Deaf or something like that. But yours is beautiful!
And Janey - I hadn't thought about Still Crazy - but you're right - it fits, honey. It fits.
And I'd actually forgotten about the American song. That was weird - like an adulterated episode of deja vu, hearing that again!
Damn girl - I'm gonna see you in four days. It just hit me. So amazing, really!
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