Y’all ever have lyric-free music in your head and have no idea where it came from or where you heard it? And you can’t get rid of it? You can’t search for it on the Internet because–lyric free! And you don’t know the artist or composer.
Saturday a talented guitarist and singer I follow on Instagram played a song that has been in my brain for decades but I never knew the lyrics so I couldn’t find it.
This is true of a few songs, including one my writing partners and I used to call our “elevator song” or “hold music.” I told my Instagram friend this. In back and forth, he gave me some guesses, and I went down a rabbit hole on YouTube trying to find it.
I haven’t found it yet. But in that effort, I found the following videos. They play snippets of songs we get in our brains and identify them for us so if we want the songs, or want to hear the entire compositions, we’ll have a starting point to find them on the Internet.
I had fun listening to them and thinking, OH! That’s what that is? Everything from classical to pop music, surf music to movie themes, big band and bossa nova, TV music to opera, and music you may hear on commercials. There may be some repeats because they come from different sources. There was almost nothing I hadn’t heard, but plenty I didn’t know the source or names of. Consider this a gift from one of my characters whose brain NEVER STOPS doing this to him–and therefore, he never stops putting it in my head.
Each video is between 10 and 15 minutes long, I think. Enjoy!
ETA 7/2/20: Found it!
For nearly 4 years, I had a tune in my head from time-to-time. Allways the same tune. Until one day, at the laundry, the TV on a music channel that only plays music (remember MTV?), I heard that tune! It was playing in a badly compressed format over a satelite musak channel on very bad squeaky “tv speakers” that make me cringe like nails on chalkboards.
But the text on that TV said that tune was the work-out training montage from a Rocky movie. (I want my MTV!)
But the past year or so, I’ve been doing the off-and-on FLAC project, where all my vinyl and CD music is imported and archived into FLAC the lossless compression for back-up purposes. It’s been all pre-90’s, but now I’m in the 90’s. So far, I save 1/3 of storage than if I just copied CDs and my records to the computer in raw PCM or WAV standard formats. That may not sound like much fun, but I get to listen and re-live moments as I progress through the years of my music. Finding the original UK Now That’s What I Call Music vinyl was like feeding my soul where the track programming was more important than filling a CD with crap, along with John Williams, Tchikovsky (sp?) Nutcracker, a Mickey Mouse record, Def Leppard, Pet Shop Boys, ABBA, Daft Punk, Moody Blues, Mika, etc. (The programming of tracks in Now… during those early 80’s is what taught the K-Tel and Telstar throw-away records to do better or get out of the way.) Of course, these days people think mp3 or mp4 rocks their world, which was such a regression that I think it brought back vinyl.
You are smart to be organizing and saving your music this way!