Turn it Up! This is My Favorite Song!

Listen to this. It is the song, Victoria, by The Kinks off their LP Arthur. I dare you to not feel happier and more alive having listened to that for a little more than 3 minutes. Nothing else but music can do this to me. I have been so ho-hum this week and then, listening to Radio Paradise this morning, I heard Victoria, a song I haven't heard in many years. So many years, I had forgotten it was even The Kinks. It has totally changed my outlook on the day.

The words don't matter. I don't much care about British colonial empire or the political maps of the day. The lyrics could talk about the virtues of eating frozen poop and I would still love the song. No drug has such a great euphoric effect for so cheap (free!) and so long (sing it again!) with so little side effects (other than permanent hearing loss if you can't keep the volume at reasonable levels).

Another of my favorite songs is by The Kinks as well. It is "Come Dancin'" and it is one of the songs I will stay in my car to listen to after I have reached my destination. There is a certain sadness to the chord progression that makes the listener really feel the melancholia the Davies brothers are trying to convey. It is a simple and sweet story of the local dance house being torn down to make way for a bowling alley that is an allegory for growing up and losing some of that special magic that surrounds us when we are children which disappears into the firmament as we age, no matter how hard we try to grasp it. Essentially, you can't go home again. It is an upbeat poppy song, but if you listen to the subtext, you will see there is real sadness and depth of emotion behind it.

I could never categorize or rate my favorite songs or even bands because the answer changes every day. I was at lunch a couple months ago in a local pub near my office in Mt. Clemens and I swear the music selection was being picked directly from my brain. It was a satellite station. Maybe all the schizophrenics are right, the satellites are trying to read our thoughts. If the magnificence of that set was any indication, the satellites can read my thoughts any day. On that day, at that lunch it was the perfect set of music. On any other day, maybe I would have changed the channel or tuned out any one or all those songs. The music makes the moment and the moment makes the music.

One of those great conversation starter questions we used to ask each other in college is if you could only have one sense, the other six gone forever, which would you keep. As long as there is music, my sense of hearing is the singular most important sense I have. So many moments in my life are tied to music and that music is the only thing that recalls those memories.

I use a certain decision tree when trying to match the music to the mood and the surrounding. If it is winter, I'm a little down, I want to read something and I am alone- it has to be Counting Crowes, August and Everything After. Raining, dark in the middle of the day, got a headache and just want to chill? Norah Jones will do, but specifically Come Away With Me. Say it's sunny, i've got chores to do or it will be a busy day and I need a pick me up, it has to be Paul Simon, Graceland, on vinyl only. It should be a crime to listen to this album on anything but vinyl. Late night, can't sleep, alone, lots on my mind- The Wall, over the headset not the speakers... This is music designed to get into your head and it helps to place it close to your ears. Also, when I am screaming along to the music, I can hear myself less. meaning I don't get as self conscious. The net effect is I have a sore throat and feel as though my energy has been ripped from my core, but that is the point.

Because I so closely attribute most music to specific moods or memories, I am persnickety about the music I choose to listen to at a given moment. I usually find myself disappointed because my moods and memories tend to be fleeting. for instance, I have all my Beck CDs in my car right now, because I had a hankering for Beck the other week. It turns my stomach to think of listening to Beck today. I'm not in the mood. This type of psychosis must drive normal people crazy... How can 400 CDs, 200 LPs and 8,000 iTunes songs not allow you to listen to precisely the music you want to hear at any given moment? I can't justify it, but it isn't enough. It will never be enough, because as long as there is music I haven't heard I can't rest. If I were a wealthy man, I would blow it all at the record store, just like if I were a kid. This is why I'm not a wealthy man. An odd paradox, this. Given these circumstances, my next car will have satellite radio... I want to tune into the deep cut station and just ride around in perpetual musical discovery and rediscovery.

I am listening to Radio Paradise as I write this and Bowie just came on, Ashes to Ashes. It reminds me of movie "The Life Aquatic" which features only Bowie music. The two are ideally suited, both odd and approachable all at once. Now, a Mark Knopfler song came on that I've never heard, but within the space of a single bar, I know it is unmistakeably a Knopfler song. My parents walked out on a concert of his at The House of Blues in Vegas. I was so angry, because he is truly a rock god! They were there with the parents of one of his backing musicians which means they could have met Mark Knopfler. "It was too lound..." said my dad, the man who will listen to a Celine Dion or Shania Twain song at greater than mid-volume and loves Manheim Steamroller... a lot. Perfection means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I suppose it is what makes the world go around.