Hearing things (in music, that is)

This past weekend, I cranked up the CD player and listened to the album Who We Used to Be by James Blunt. It’s a good album, and I think one of the reasons I got it is that I caught him talking about it in an interview and he described it as being music for grown-ups. I certainly agree. So much popular music is geared toward young people, and people seem to stick with the music of their high school and young adult lives their entire lifetimes, but it’s a lot more fun to sing about falling in love as opposed to paying the bills and making sure to get to bed on time… Not that these are the topics that he sings about! Some of these are actually much darker! There’s one that is called “The Girl That Never Was” which deals with a couple mourning a miscarriage. Let me share that with you here:

One of the things that struck me, though, is how familiar the tune sounds. There’s a little bit where he sings “just like we always saw” that I absolutely knew is in another song. After awhile, the words “when you’re down” came to mind, and after being tormented by this mystery for a couple of hours, I started searching the internet trying to find the other song.

I couldn’t remember anything else about the other song except that little phrase, which was virtually useless, but I had a sense that the song came from the 70s, so I started searching for songs with that phrase from that time period. With a little bit of searching, the song “It’s a Heartache” by Bonnie Tyler came up in a page of search results, and immediately, I knew this was the song I was trying to remember.

I’ve been running around like crazy recently, and haven’t had a lot of time to consider these two more deeply, but as I’ve gotten older, I seem to catch more and more of these little things, especially in music. Music isn’t the only place it happens, though –

Our stories, our music… It’s not that they’re all necessarily rip-offs of each other, but our brains collect bits and pieces of things, mash them up, forget pieces, then glue them back together with some added bits, and they’re all “new”. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s these things that tell the heart of the most true stories, the things that frame our worldview, the things that keep us going when reason doesn’t seem to work anymore. As a 17-year-old, I didn’t necessarily hear these things unless they were blatant like “A Lover’s Concerto“. Now, I end up “hearing things” in music everywhere I go.

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