Thoughts about music.

My son asked his mother something he described as an odd question: "What are your ten all-time favorite songs?" I don't know how my wife answered, but his question caused me to think. Fist, I did not find the question to be odd. This son is a college professor, a Cognitive Scientist, no less. Maybe he is thinking of some sort of study relating a person's choice of music to their personality traits - I have no idea. I did find his question - in my case - impossible to answer. During my 25 years in broadcasting, I played thousands of songs on the air. There is no way I could name my ten all-time favorites.

Songs evoke memories. Some songs which I did not actually like, evoke pleasant memories, so it is good to hear those songs. Some songs evoke both pleasant and unpleasant memories: pleasant because they recall some happy event. Unpleasant because of a later unhappy ending that followed event... such as, perhaps, the memory of a good friend who later died.

People seem to remember songs for other, different reasons. My wife, an excellent dancer, sometimes says of a song that she paid no attention to the lyric, she just loved the music. I happen to listen for lyrics. I have never been able to dance. Early in our 40+ year marriage she tried to teach me to dance. "Just listen to the beat", she suggested. "What's that?", I asked. She gave up. I was dead serious. I hear the music as a complete blend of all the instruments. I have asked her about a specific sound in a specific piece of music, and she immediately tells me the instrument that made the sound. How does she do that?

I love the skilled use of language and greatly appreciate skillfully written lyrics. Years ago, Reader's Digest magazine included a feature titled "Toward More Picturesque Speech". One quote I remember was, "The man sat heavily in the chair." What a beautifully simple way to perfectly describe something familiar to us all, yet otherwise hard to describe!

In some songs, the lyric is so skillfully written it carries a strong emotional impact. That's my kind of music, even if I don't particularly like the music! It is comforting to know others share that feeling. A fellow disk jockey friend and I once visited about the performance of other disk jockeys. He deplored an incident wherein a young deejay played a Righteous Brother's record on which the lyric pleaded, "...for once in my life let me hold onto the thing I've found...", and followed the song with some silly, flip comment. I agreed. The singer caused the listener to feel the pain of a man always disappointed in life. How could the deejay ignore that pain. Maybe he heard something in the music which we had not heard.