Brinens and Things

Sort-of-tagged by @justice-turtle. Name ten songs you’re obsessed with:

(I’m going to mutate the “obsessed with” in a different direction than JT did, and do songs that have been important or special to me.)

(In rough chronological order of when they became important/special.)

(Disclaimer: I have not listened to the Youtube links to make sure they work properly.)

1. “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”, Eiffel 65. For something like seven years, I would occasionally get stuck in my head a snatch of tune I called the Ghost. I didn’t know if it was a song I’d heard once as a small child, or something my brain had come up with on its own. I had no idea where to even begin trying to look it up: the memory(?) did not come with any lyrics.

Then, at a bowling alley when I was fifteen, I heard it. At first, I feared it might slip away from me again, as there was too much background noise to make out the words. Fortunately, Mom recognised it, and gave me the name and artist. I was so happy to have finally identified it, I didn’t even care that I came in last in the game.

2. [redacted]. Since I heard this song, my life has never known peace. (Well, okay, it’s known a hell of a lot *less* peace than it would have otherwise.) I probably never would have handled this song very well, but it definitely made things worse that I first heard it while especially vulnerable. To this day, after all this time, it still triggers the fuck out of me. I heard *two seconds* of it in December (before noping the hell out of the store), and it took days for the pain to fade, for it to stop intruding into my thoughts.

I still get twitchy around radios sometimes, if I’m already in a bad way or if it’s a station that’s been known to play it. I still occasionally have nightmares about being forced to hear it. Sometimes even stations that exclusively play new songs worry me a little: having witnessed the depths of how awful a song can be, a proof of concept, there’s a little part of me that wonders how long until someone makes another just as bad.

(I take comfort in the possibility that this song was grandfathered in from a more psychologically fragile version of me, and that–knock on wood–it might not *be* possible to make another just as bad.)

((You know how radio stations these days have websites that tell you what their playlists for the past week have been? I want them to have pages where they tell you what they’re *going* to play. People who like being surprised can avoid looking at those pages, and people with song-related triggers can know when not to go grocery shopping (and can shop with confidence when they *do* go).))

3. “Follow You, Follow Me”, Genesis. There’d been previous Phil Collins songs I’d heard and liked, but this was the song that sparked my special interest in Phil Collins’ music. I heard it on the radio on my way to a Girl Scout event in the autumn of 2006; my Google-fu was terrible when I was 12/13, so it took me three months of wondering about it and over an hour of active searching for me to figure out which song it was.

Have you ever listened to a song you have a special interest in? It’s indescribable. It’s *such* a high.

I rationed it out carefully, knowing my general tendency to have weaker feelings about a song the more times I’ve heard it. (I didn’t account for the fact that my special interests generally only last a year or two, though, so I may have been a bit *too* careful.)

I don’t listen to this song much anymore, because it’s unnerving to hear how far it’s fallen now that the special interest has faded. Like, it’s *nice*, but it’s not *ecstatic* the way it was when I was 13.

4. “Come With Me”, Phil Collins. The only explicit lullaby* I’ve ever actually liked. I think because there was so little pressure in the circumstances around me listening to it: nobody ever forced me to listen to it, nobody hyped it up.

*personally I think “Hold on My Heart” is more soothing, but it’s not really *aiming* for that the way “Come With Me” is

5. “Rolling in the Deep”, Adele. I like 10’s pop a lot better than 00’s pop (I think because when I was a child, kids I disliked tended to be into 00’s pop, and even when I wasn’t in contact with them I viewed 00’s pop through a negative lens because of that), and to me this was the point of changeover between the two. It was refreshing to have a current Top 40 song that I actively *liked*.

6. “Never Let Me Go”, Florence and the Machine. While it’s never been ecstatic the way “Follow You, Follow Me” was, it’s been nice to finally have a favourite song again. And it was my introduction to Florence and the Machine, a very good band in general (though I have *still* not gotten around to finishing my first listen-through of their 2015 album and deciding which of the songs I like; I have not been good at adding new songs to my collection lately). Thank you, random viral Tumblr user who recced it.

7. “Bombay Sapphires”, Stevie Nicks/“Think About It”, Stevie Nicks/“Docklands”, Stevie Nicks. That might qualify as cheating, but all of these fall into the same category: songs whose lyrics didn’t used to make sense until suddenly clicking one day in my late teens/early twenties. You can pretty much trace my developing ability to parse poetic language by how many Stevie Nicks songs I understand. (Some of them I can still see how I would have gotten confused, but last week I was listening to “Bombay Sapphires” and wondering how I ever managed to not understand this song. (although on further reflection, I think the first-person/third-person switches might have been a big part of it))

8. “Sorry”, Assemblage 23. This song probably isn’t ~supposed~ to be about social justice, but it’s definitely about social justice.

Hearing this song for the first time was the tipping point that led to me cutting a lot of contact with old friends and old reading-material-sources. It dawned on me, listening to it, that it’s a *really* bad sign when you start identifying with songs about unhealthy relationships.

(Sample of the lyrics:

“I’m sorry I can’t always drown

In rivers of despair

A man forever broken by

A need for your repair

I’m sorry if the things I said

Were somehow misconstrued

I’m sorry, yes I’m sorry

So sorry

But not as sorry as you”)

9. “Sad Angel”, Fleetwood Mac. It was nice to turn the tables and have *me* introduce *Mom* to Fleetwood Mac. Giving a loved one [music from their favourite band] that they had no idea existed is priceless.

10. “Almost Home”, Sultan and Shepard. The newest addition to my music collection. Under normal circumstances it would have just been okay (maybe still good enough to keep around), but I first heard it all the way through during the first time I was in a different country from my parents*, so I was particularly prone to Feelings about reuniting loved ones. I remember listening to it on the radio at work the day they were due to come back, singing along and trying not to cry.

*Or rather, they were in a different country from me. I stayed put, they went away. (not by choice: there were family matters in America that needed taking care of in person)

---

Tags:

#oh look an original post #music #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #my childhood #long post #meme