The one you really like but don’t know the name of, or who does it?
They always play it on the radio but you never hear it unless you just turned your stereo on or you just flipped over to the station. And you come in about halfway through the song. And of course they gave the name and artist before they play the song and they never announce it afterward, and you call the station but they never know what you’re talking about.
They usually play it during their retro Eighties hours. It’s very New Wavey.
And there’s this killer techno-dance remix of it. They play it in the clubs all the time. Except that one’s a white-label promo, maybe even a bootleg. Vinyl only, of course. And every time you go to the DJ booth and ask about it, he’s always just stepped out for a clove or something.
You think you might have seen a video for it, on MTV in the middle of the night a long time ago. But the cable went out before the song finished and you never saw that artist-and-title caption.
You’ve looked on Kaaza and Napster, but that of course was futile.
It’s very catchy. You remember how it goes, but when you try to hum it for people you can never get the notes quite right.
It’s got lyrics, but a lot of them are really buried down in the mix so you can’t understand them, and the ones you can understand are really generic phrases like “I love you” and “don’t leave me” and how many songs out there have lyrics like that?
It’s a sad song. Some people mistake it “Just Like Heaven”. Others mistake it for “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
I’ve heard that song too, and no, I don’t know who does it, either. But look at it like this– everyone has a song like that, that they know and like and know nothing about. At least, everyone I’ve ever talked to does.
You know what I think?
I think it’s the same damn song. For everyone. No, really– it’s the “don’t leave me” bit that tipped me off. That seems to stick in a lot of people’s heads.
‘Course, I don’t have any way of concretely proving any of this.
I know that song.
I always hear the end line and fading chorus when I turn on the radio and then the freaking DJ cuts to ads and when he comes back on he never says what the damn song’s name is.
Its an amazing song, I just don’t know what how it starts. It kind of reminds me of Liam Lynch’s Fake Pixies Song sung by Tori Amos.
I once found a CDR on the floor… that’s right, sitting on the floor in the middle of the mall, data-side up… God knows who left it there, or how it avoided getting stepped on, or why I was the first one to notice it; it was dusty enough it must have been sitting there for a week, and I spotted it on the day after chrismas.
Actually, now that I think about it, I can understand why nobody noticed it: after all, the pre-chrismas mall riots don’t exactly encourage people to stand still or look down, and my dad always taught me to scan the floor for cash. That still doesn’t explain how it got there, unscratched, or how it got just over an hour and ten minutes of eerily familiar but unrecognizable music burned onto it wthout so much as a blurred smudge of magic marker for a lable. The freakiest part is, I’ve started to work out how it explains the unusual events in my life, even those I wasn’t fully aware of before. Not just anyone’s life; mine in particular.
You probably think I’m making this up.
That it’s some elaborately fabricated contribution to the game world.
It’s not. I didn’t.