Last week a friend of mine asked me why all the entries in this blog are named after songs.
…music, makes the people, come together…
It is my sincerest hope that as you read these, you, like me when I write, are humming the songs to yourself. Electronic copyright being the hot topic that it is these days, I can’t add the music to the articles, but I willingly encourage you to adopt a tradition hewn into my family tree; everyday life has a soundtrack.
Most of my earliest memories are attached to songs.
My father being as he was, obsessed with the Beatles, we were cued by “now’s the time to say goodnight” to go to bed, screamed “you say it’s your birthday” once per child per year and “so this is Christmas” woke us up to discover Santa’s bounty until well after I stopped believing that a bloke with a beard in a fleece suit would be climbing down the flue in a country that doesn’t have chimneys and suffers heat waves at Christmas.
But Dad took it a step further.
Coming home one weekend from my first waitressing job with 3rd degree burns to my hand, he played John Farnham’s “Burn for You” to welcome me, red skin bubbling off my hand, back into the house. As an anxious 16 year old on the day I left for twelve months in France, he played “She’s Leaving Home” and as his earthly remains were placed in the ground for all eternity he had chosen the music and “a blackbird singing in the dead of night”. Not that I’ve seen it but even his gravestone is engraved with a line from the “Long and Winding Road”.
She’ll deny it, but Motherbear also had her own Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. She’d clean the house to Queen’s “I want to break free”, taught me French with Manhattan Transfer’s “Chanson d’Amour” and played Enya to a blind and decrepit Molly the afternoon before she went to the vet for the green dream.
With such heritage, it is only normal that I too have lived out the momentous occasions of my life to the dulcet tones of Madonna, complete with backing singers, dancers, costume changes and choreography.
Today, I vacuumed the flat, urged on by my favourite home cleaning motivational speakers, Girls Aloud, and their version of Jump, shaking my rear like Hugh Grant while I sucked – all puns intended. I run with just-beat-it Jacko, work with Elton’s I-think-its-going-to-be-a-long-long-time-rocket-man and cook to Kylie. Every time I walk out of an airplane I hear the Beach Boys sing, “God only knows” like they did in that final scene of Love Actually. I landed in New York singing Gene Kelly “what a wonderful town”, hum Piaf’s “Vie en Rose” in Paris and my early childhood in Sydney is infused with Cold Chisel’s “Saturday Night”.
Hearing the songs helps me remember the days and the weeks and the months and the years. It also allows me for about four and a half minutes to feel like I live in my very own West End musical, or even better, that I am the Special Guest Star in an episode of Glee; just like Mrs Coldplay was last week under her um-ber-ella.
Or maybe, given the unnatural obsession with Madonna, and show tunes, there is just a screaming pink sequined queen trapped inside, desperate to crawl out of my belly like that puppet in Alien.
gratuitous pic of the world where I live, yeah yeah
…life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone, I hear you call me name, and it feels like home…