For Your Listening Pleasure

I picked up my youngest son, who is four and a half years old, from preschool the other day and the first thing he asked when he got in the car was if he could listen to the music on my Kindle “on the big radio.” My car has an auxiliary connector that lets me plug in an mp3, iPod or Kindle so that I can listen to music or audio books while I drive. Since I have an hour commute each way to work every night, I listen to A LOT of books. Both of my sons have become more adept at navigating the games and music files that I keep for them. My youngest enjoys a wide range of music by default, because he can only listen to the songs I’ve put on the device. He likes to listen to the first four seconds of every song.

Only the first four seconds.

Every once in a while, he’ll forget to skip a song, or he’ll deign to finish a song that his older brother or I want to hear.

This particular day was no different from any other, except he wanted to listen to one specific song. He can’t read yet, so he doesn't know the titles of the songs. He couldn’t remember what the picture of the album cover looked like. Then I asked him to sing a little bit of the song for me.

“It’s the song about the leg,” he said, kicking his leg out in case I hadn’t heard him right.

“The leg?” I clarified.

“The man who lost his leg climbing the sail.”

The mental Rolodex hit high gear as I tried to place the lyric he remembered with the songs in my library. After a minute, it came to me.

“I know,” I said to him. “You want “Shipping up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he shouted with glee. “Murphys!”

I found the song for him and he happily listened to the first four seconds. About eight times or nine times in a row. I became numb to the bagpipes, bass, guitars and drums after the second go-round. Then he moved on to scanning the rest of the songs. I marveled at his ability to remember a specific line from a song that really didn’t have anything to do with the title.

But it got me to thinking about other songs where one particular lyric sticks in my brain and becomes the only way I can identify the song.

O.A.R. sings “Turn the car around” eight times, “Shattered” just six times, yet for months I thought the title of their song really was “Turn the car around.” It doesn’t count that they put “turn the car around” in parentheses in the title.

And what about songs where the title is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the songs? Here is a perfect example...

Nowhere in the song do you hear the words Baba O’Riley. In fact, if you’re a second generation The Who listener like me, meaning I only hear them when I listen to a classic rock station, you’d think the name of the song was “Teenage Wasteland” by the sheer number of times Roger Daltrey sings those words.

I guess it doesn’t really matter what the title of a song is, or how many times a particular lyric is repeated, (Eddie Vedder, this is for you), as long as the song rocks it's going to get listened to.

Or at least the first four seconds, if my youngest has any control over the music.