A Few of My Favorite Things: Songs You Forgot You Loved

In honor of the Yuletide season, and with the degree of introspection that is called for with the coming of the new year, we here at the Redel Traub Report would like to list a few of our favorite things. While the Report normally trades in hard news and even harder hitting opinions, for the next week or so we'll take a look at the simple things that warm our hearts.

(A quick digression, though it seems fairly trite to mock the lyrics to a song in a musical. The Sound of Music list of favorite things is kind of ridiculous. Granted cream colored ponies, and crisp apple strudels are great, but some of her favorite things seem benign or worse. For instance, rain drops on roses? Wild geese? Brown paper packages? Given the political mise-en-scene, of The Sound of Music, these brown paper packages were likely filled with Nazi memorabilia or maybe surveys asking citizens to snitch on their Jewish neighbors. Wild geese seem like they can be a dangerous menace, and the Wild Geese were a historical group of Irish mercenary soldiers, so wild geese are far from peaceful.)

Anyway, today's favorite thing is: When you hear a song that you'd forgotten that you'd loved. Herman Melville coined the phrase the "shock of recognition" to refer to Nathaniel Hawthorne's work. By this he meant that he recognized in Hawthorne's work feelings and issues that resonated deeply with him, in a way that he almost didn't realize. When you hear a song that was once a key part of your oeuvre that you'd since let slip into oblivion, you feel that same sense of the shock of recognition. The song brings you back to the milieu in which you'd first enjoyed it. You find yourself enjoying precisely the same elements that you used to enjoy, plus now the song is imbued with the nostalgia for the time when it was a central part of your musical experience. In the age of digital music, I have about 10,000 songs on my current computer plus a couple thousand more on external hard drive, not to mention the thousands I've lost to various computer maladies, it is easy to forget about a song that was once so integral to your being. When you fall in love with a song, it is sometimes hard to imagine that you will ever find a song that strikes you with such joie de vive. And yet, soon that song is replaced by another, relegated further and further down your Itunes playlist, until eventually it fades away amidst album cuts and songs you never liked in the first place. When you hear that song, several years older, with changed musical taste, it provides an ineffable feeling of happiness. It's at least better than snowflakes that stay on your nose and eyelashes.


P.S. Here's a song that recently found its way back into my life, and warmed my heart http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUrLN4o6GRc