Songs with a bittersweet taste
There are guilty pleasures. We talk about them a fair bit here at Blog on the Tracks. But this goes beyond that - I'm thinking of the song (or songs) that you have a real love/hate relationship with; that almost cause pain.
Songs that you have some personal connection with and that impacts (ruins) the way you listen to the tune.
Maybe you've played a song to death in a band? That'll do it. Or maybe you went out with a girl called Sophie right when that Goodshirt song Sophie was, bizarrely, a hit (that song is stupid).
A definite catalyst for a bittersweet taste - when it comes to a song - is it being named after someone you don't like. Maybe someone you used to love...
Or it could be simpler than that.
For me - most obviously - it is the song Toxic by Britney Spears.
Most readers will know why (and that was not a trick - that link is to the version by Britney Spears). But if you don't know why I am naming Toxic as a bittersweet song, it is because I foolishly set myself up to be filmed performing it for all (stupid enough) to see. You can click here for the full back story.
Now there are some sick people in this world - there must be - because I see that the YouTube clip of me in a Santa suit sleighing Britney (as it were) has had over 700 hits. Sweetman family members can only account for around 600 of those hits. That means there's some pretty deranged people out there - we call them Blog on the Tracks readers. (Thanks for reading by the way!)
But Toxic has a bittersweet taste for me because I never minded the song. I think it's a good pop song. And you can click here for the cover version by The Chapin Sisters (again, not a trick - this is actually a cover by The Chapin Sisters). As soon as I heard that cover version I recognised it as a decent pop tune (I had never paid much attention to the Britney original).
So - we flash forward to me murdering it (and if you click there you are actually asking for it - that is the link to me in a Santa suit trying to sing Toxic) and the day after I filmed that I had the song in my head.
I swear the soundtrack to my nightmares is now a sequenced "baby can't you see...I'm calling..." I was at work the day after filming myself singing terribly and I had bits of the original tune stuck in my head - a near-endless warp.
Ah - but it was fun though. Right?
Well it's bittersweet - I'm going to live with people asking me to singing that song whenever Singstar is plugged in; a victory lap in the Special Olympics of singing.
I thought about this idea of a song being bittersweet - causing pleasure and pain, being a love/hate thing - because the other day I uploaded a video to my Facebook page of The Bangles singing Eternal Flame. Who doesn't love that song, right?
Well Katy has a story...she started to tell me...oh, what the heck, she's a story-teller in her own right. Take it away Katy...
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Every time I hear Eternal Flame something weird happens to me. It's not really what I'd call nostalgia - because that would imply a recollection of something pleasant - and it's not like abject terror from an accidental confrontation with a suppressed childhood memory or anything. Maybe it's somewhere in between the two things. Maybe there is a word for what I am about to explain, but if there is I don't know it.
I'm sure it's the same for everyone. I'm not really sure why it is that music is so evocative of time and place or, in this case, a particular memory. Why you can't just listen to an old song, one you've known forever, without it being wrapped up in a whole heap of emotional stuff you thought you had jettisoned (when, little did you know, it was just sitting in your cerebral recycle bin all this time just waiting for its cue to resurface). Why even the slightest snatch of song can bring it all back, good or bad, vivid as the day it all happened.
[Actually, I do have a few theories on why this is, but this isn't the place for them (and if I did take the risk of boring you with my bush lawyer approach to pop psychology right here I might not get invited back).]
So, a case in point. Eternal Flame. In what we used to call Form One back in the day, I wanted to be in the school choir. Or actually maybe it was the school production.
They held auditions. St Cuthbert's College music department, 1989. I remember the room, the layout of the room, the light in the room. I remember the angle of the piano and the colour of its wood. I think I even remember the texture of the carpet in the room. I don't remember what was written on the blackboard in the room that day, but I don't want to think too much about it. I think I could probably remember even that if I tried hard enough.
More than anything I remember how badly I wanted to be in the choir. Or the school production. Both, probably, but I think I have conflated two separate memories, rolled them up into one big eternal flaming.
I remember rehearsing in my bedroom. And I mean rehearsing a lot. I remember the nerves. But nervous as I was, all of 11, I was spurred on by a vision of greatness, by sheer determination and probably a good deal of weak-kneed naivety.
I think you might know where this is heading. You know that feeling when you're the last person picked for a team in gym (that was me, too, but that's a whole other story, and one that has nothing to do with music). Or those scenes in American high school movies where they post a list of the chosen few on the bulletin board among the lockers in the corridor. Cheerleading or band camp or gridiron - the particular extracurricular activity doesn't matter. What matters is the moment when you look for your name, starting from the bottom up, and it isn't there. The moment when Eve is expelled from Paradise comes to mind. That might sound dramatic, but remember we're dealing with an 11-year-old's emotions here.
What I couldn't see clearly then (but can now, of course) was that I was effectively tone
deaf, heir to a strong and inescapable fortune of tone-deafness. The very fact that I even fronted for the audition was an act of sheer prepubescent stupidity which, from that moment on, I very quickly grew out of. With a couple of decades' worth of water under the bridge, I now mark up the music teacher for keeping a straight face.
And that's what I think of when I hear Eternal Flame. My very first rejection, the first dashing of hope.
As a postscript, after years of piano and violin tuition I managed to find the tune. If you are ever involved in an evening of Singstar with me and I won't give the microphone back or play nicely, then now you know why. I do have something to prove.
And, as a PPS, speaking of the Toxic debacle, I was never, ever as bad as Simon. Even at 11.
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So - there's my story and Katy's story. What's your story? What song is never a straightforward exercise in listening for you? What song brings with it bizarre, complicated baggage? What song has a bittersweet taste for you?
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Yeah, I get that same feeling listening to 'Dueling Banjos'.
'Whats my age again?' by Blink 182. My wife and I had not been dating long when it came out and we were both 23...
'Romeo and Juliet' by Dire Straits. See if you can guess my first girlfriend's name.
'Pets' by Porno for Pyros, since it was the song playing on the car stereo when I had my big lucky-not-to-be-fatal car accident 15 years ago.
"Solsbury Hill" - my bad :)
Its funny, I was thinking about this the other day - there are a lot of songs that remind me of specific people or specific places, so much so that as soon as I hear the first 2 or 3 seconds of the song, I go back to those places. Sometimes it is good (Enter the Sandman takes me back to extreme RollerCoasters in the States and some wonderful memories) or bad (The Proclaimers 500 miles reminds me of tramping / trekking with someone). I was also banned from listening to a song by an old friend because it reminded her of some of the pain in her life and I still change the station when it comes on now, despite it being 10 years ago (November Rain, GnR).
Songs that get played at funerals always become bittersweet. "He ain't heavy, he's my brother" (The Hollies) is the most stand out for me as it was played at the funeral of a good friend and mentor of mine... almost 20 years ago now and I'll still change the station or leave the room when it comes on.
There's the 'first dance' song that played at your (first) wedding...
Then there are the ones (to borrow a phrase from the toothless one) that fell into heaven, while the others fell into hell... the songs that may have become bittersweet but are now the most hopeful and sweetest. The songs or albums you thrashed when you didn't think it would work out... but, miraculously, it worked out better than you could have imagined. Wilco's "Being There" and Bragg/Wilco's "Mermaid Avenue Vol 2" are up there for me. Radiohead's "Kid A" could have been, as I listened to it as much at the same period, but I returned it to the library and never somehow have never heard a bar of it again.
'Devil Inside' by Inxs, and perhaps the whole greatest hits album in fact, was playing before my parents sat my brother and 7yo self down to tell us that they were getting divorced and we would spent the next 10 years swapping houses, holidays, families and lives every week. Worked out in the end, but I havn't listened to the whole song since.
When I was about six I remember sitting in the lounge and practising my singing to Karen Carpenter's I Won't Last A Day Without You. She was my singing-into-a-hair-brush, playing-on-repeat hero. I was trying to connect with the song despite not knowing most of the words. I was singing at the top of my very sturdy six year old lungs and loving it, was singing so loud I didn't hear the phone ring. And even though it was just my mum's friend on the phone, and they were just chatting about recipes or whatever the topic is for mums in the 80s, I felt so mortified when I turned around and saw that mum was talking on the phone. I had been channelling Karen and flouncing around (slightly limited by how far the headphones would reach)and Mrs On-The-Phone would have heard the whole thing. It all sounds like a bit of a non-event but if I ever hear that song I am overcome with shame. Which is mostly fine because I never hear that song. But I will always remember having a sob after being so incredibly embarrased.
For me it's Time Is Running Out by Muse, and to a lesser extent some of the other stuff off the Absolution album. I love that song, but it dredges up some painful memories.
The Verve has always been bittersweet for me.
Pop music star Whitney Houston dies
Wellington woman found safe in motel
Kiwis land big Aussie contract
Piri Weepu stakes his claim for No 10
Pop music star Whitney Houston dies
Kiwis finish on a high with Davis Cup wins
Wellington woman found safe in motel
India scrape a win over Australia in one-dayer
Lydia Ko blitzes amateurs at Australian Open
Warriors' Maloney concentrating on task at hand
Stags beat Auckland in domestic one-day final
Katy, I feel your pain. My tone deafness manifests itself as sounding very much like a cat on a fence whenever I have the Singstar mike, and like you I humiliated myself auditioning for the school production of Guys & Dolls. But "A Bushel & A Peck" is not my bittersweet song (although it's the only blight among the delight that is Julie & Julia). For me it's Peter Gabriel's Salisbury Hill. I love the song, and I mentally patted myself on the back when I worked out that it was about Gabriel leaving Genesis. But it was also one that I listened to repeatedly one miserable afternoon when I was stuck, alone in Wellington, lovesick and desperate and with no-one to talk to. So whenever I hear it I'm transported back to that awful afternoon and the dejection I felt then, which is a shame, because as I said I love the song. Sucks.