Friday, March 12, 2010

I'm Wide Awake It's Morning


It’s happened to all of us. For some, it might happen every morning. Your eyes open, your mind snaps on, it’s time to start your day, but for some reason, you can’t think about anything but that friggin’ song that keeps replaying in your head. Where did it come from? You can’t even remember hearing it recently.

For me, just like a dream, it seems like sometimes the lyrics have some relevance to what I have seen or been talking about the day before. For example, this morning I couldn’t stop singing “…waiting for Pavement to get back together.” It’s a lyric from The National’s So Far Around the Bend. I haven’t heard the song in months but before I went to bed the night before I glanced at an article in Rollingstone Magazine about Pavement getting back together. Makes sense.

Upon thinking about it, these relevant snippets of lyrics pop into my mind throughout the day. In fact, it’s a quirk I have had since I was a kid. I have a very distinct memory of driving in the backseat of my mom’s car on the way to the hospital to see my grandpa when he was deathly ill. I was 11. The whole family was sitting in silence, just thinking to themselves about the gravity of the situation, when I belted out Whitney Houston’s, “I will always love you.” Needless to say it lightened the mood for a moment, but I remember my mom noting the relevance of the lyric to the thoughts in her head. For me, it was completely subconscious. I didn’t purposefully sing that lyric, it just came out.

More recently I had bumped into an old friend on the street and he seemed to have aged a bit, and didn’t seem as though he was doing well. After we exchanged our courteous hellos, I walked off with the Simon and Garfunkel’s A Hazy Shade of Winter, “Time, time, time, see what’s become of me…”

For these reasons, it makes me realize just how different of an input music is for our brains. It goes into your mind, hides there, and comes out with your subconscious. What other art form does that?

That being said, next time “don’t stand so close to me,” is in my head and won’t leave, instead of being angry and dismissing it, perhaps I should reassess my emotions and give the people around me fair warning that I need my space.

Kendra Rubinfeld

4 comments:

  1. Good stuff! I'm currently taking psychology and this goes perfectly with everything I'm being inundated with.

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  2. Debbie McGuire12/3/10 19:37

    I really enjoyed your aticle today. Love hearing your thoughts of childhood. Funny, at my school, we teachers will say something and then break into song. Not only do songs hang in our subconscious, there is a song for everything we say and do.

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  3. Yesterday, I woke up humming, Billy Idol's version of Mony! Mony!, C'Mon C'Mon C'Mon! Mony! Mony!... So, don't feel bad my friend. It crosses the borderline of those guilty pleasure songs...When you're driving in your car and you hear, "Pour Some Sugar on Me"! You know you want to crank it, but something inside tells you how gay it would be to do that, but you do it anyway...Love it.

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  4. Anonymous13/3/10 10:04

    I know what you mean I can't get About Today out of my head!

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