Musical Flashback

[gement]

Where were you?

I get intense flashbacks from certain songs. Many of them are just "I was half asleep and my subconscious suddenly made the lyrics so clear that they burned into my brain forever." These include Hero, Mr. Jones, and Who Will Save Your Soul.

I may or may not make this a running series. As usual, my intentions are good. I have to point out here that the songs I remember clearly don't always reflect my musical taste. They mostly reflect the pop top 40, because my hometown doesn't have a lot of radio options.

Semi-Charmed Life

It's the summer after my senior year, six o'clock in the morning. I've been working at the frozen pea factory all night, thawing samples and dipping them in brine until my clothes are crusted with salt and my fingers are freezing. Dawn light filters into the bathroom window. I'm lying in the "two-person" (read: really comfortable for one) spa tub. The water is perfectly still, and my muscles are slowly thawing. Third Eye Blind is making me grin like a maniac.

This song is an ecstacy of seized chances. I later learned from my college roommate that, amazingly, my hometown radio station played the full version instead of the common radio edit that cut out the "little red panties" verse. As of this morning when I woke up to the song, they were playing the edited version. Sellouts.

Comments

[annissamazing]

Wow.

I was thinking about you working in the lab last night. I wondered what it looked like.

Eerie.

[eeyorerin]

This is a nifty idea. Would you mind if I wrote some entries about this stuff in my own journal?

[gement.livejournal.com]

Please do! Dear lord, I never thought of this sort of thing as meme material.

I like it when people like my ideas. You just made my toes all tingly.

[capnexposition.livejournal.com]

You need to do more of these. You've told me before about some of your semi-mystical connections to certain songs (I recall Dave Matthews factoring largely in one such dialogue), and your stories always give me a kick. ^^

[hotpoint.livejournal.com]

Interesting! The way that I associate events with songs is to get captivated by them for a short while and play them over and over again while in a particular place or doing a particular task.

Around the time my first girlfriend broke up with me, my ex-housemate had given me a mix CD that hadn't burned correctly; it'd died during the Pet Shop Boys cover of "Always On My Mind". The lyrics of that song spoke to me at the time: "Little things I should have said and done, but I never took the time / You were always on my mind, you were always on my mind." I ended up playing that over and over, for a half hour or an hour at a time, dancing around the living room in the apartment I was suddenly spending a lot of time back in, resetting the CD player every time it got to the 3 minute point on the song and stuttered to a stop.

The song feels incredibly catharitic to me now. If I close my eyes, I can see the carpet and the tiny apartment fireplace and the gaudy orange-brown couch and the cardboard box/coffee table, and I can remember trying to lose myself in the music to keep from second-guessing myself. And the song's intensity increases just past the 3 minute point. :)