where did they go?

Where did they all go, it's like they just packed up and left over night in some cases.  All I know is so many of them are just....poof...gone!

Remember that song that you LIVED for back in the ----'s?  Whatever decade, whomever you are there was a song, most likely per year (probably more than one) that really touched you.  Whether the song made you dance, cry, identify with, cut straight to your soul......there was a song.  Those songs gave voice to our deepest desires, strongest feelings, deep fears, secret dreams..the things we dared not feel, think, say, or do.

I dreamed of the day I would one day dance to ABBA or the BeeGee's in a discotheque. (never happened)  I did however dance with some great friends to Madonna's Vogue in a gay bar.  I dreamed of the day the highschool love of my life would take me to prom for magic moments, we would gaze deep into each other's eyes as Up Where We Belong played on, or Forever Young by Alphaville played on (never happened) but some good friends and I did act like morons at prom, we slow danced comically and had a good time.  I dreamed of making out in a car to some fabulous, daring, make out song.  My done perfectly, my trendy shirt tucked in my trendy jeans with my trendy hair done oh so trendy, and my make up "just so".  Nary an awkward moment, only tender, deep heartfelt love...oh and total respect!!  (never happened)  My first make out happened during the movie Fletch.  The rest were all just kisses, no songs that I recall.  I also discovered that no matter how hard I tried, how much I wanted it...I couldn't make myself be happy in pastels, I couldn't find a boyfriend anywhere.  I strongly began to suspect there was something wrong with me.  I terrified guys apparently.  Maybe it was just all of me.  I was not what the songs said I should be.

When I got together with my husband at the ripe age of 19, the soundtrack of our love was Vain's cassette No Respect.  There really was none.  We were teenagers doing what teenagers did..that was each of us selling out parts of who we were to meet what the other wanted.  I forced him to listen to some punk, he dragged me through heavy metal.  As a result 22 years later we are attending our second concerts this year of our melded tastes.  Alice Cooper and Ace Frehley, Morrissey and Kristeen Young, Iron Maiden and Alice Cooper, Morrissey and Kristeen Young.  All in the course of a melded 12 month period.  Melded, just like our lives in the most unlikely of hook ups ever musically and in life!  He was the song that NEVER stopped playing in my head through all those years from 1982-1990.  Well that and Jack and Diane...I mean totally classic!!

Lately I've been going through the mental storage vault with a friend.  I have insomnia, he knows of this miracle I missed  "I Love The 80's"  and apparently "I Love The 70's".  Watching with him has dusted off so many layers of the years...oops another song...Holding Back the Years.  What a great song!  I hear them in the background of the videos, all those melodies that dominated my life, held me glued to the boom box, left me in tears, filled me with hope, the songs I prayed would be on the radio, Solid Gold, or I would hear as someone drove by.

The soundtracks of my life changed as the music changed.  Today's favorite song would give way to tomorrow's favorite...all lost along with yesterday's favorite song as they years march on.  When I hear a snippet I wonder HOW how how how could I have possibly forgotten that song??  It was the love of my life for that week the radio played it!  When did that song stop being played?

I sit here and wonder...where did they all go?  The songs, the plans, the images, the wonder, the timidity?  Music does something to me, to most of us.  It causes us to feel, joy, lightness, darkness, pain, love, loss, pure lust, hunger, fulfillment, lifted, a desire for something I could never reach, or be...a rock singer!!  I am music and I write the songs.....heck yeah!

Then like the worm in the apple...sometimes the dreaded brain melt when a song sucks so much you want to turn it off, but you can't turn it off because it's such a train-wreck you have to keep listening, jsut to see if there is ANY redemption whatsoever in the song.  I have songs locked in my brain that I detest so much I feel like screaming when I hear them...ugh...make it go away!!!  What were they thinking when they sung it, wrote it, recorded it and WHY did no one say..."ummmm this totally sucks"  Is it possible that people actually liked those hideous songs???  Were THEY someone's dream come true in music?  Did those songs fuel desires, hopes, longing, all those good feelings?  Did they touch in someone those deep emotions.  Is it possible that not everyone agrees with my musical taste?

I am sitting here wondering, over the next years how many of my cherished songs are going to disappear from my mind to make room for new cherished songs.  I thought all the good songs had been written by 1988 and I was only 18 then.  Now I think all the best songs must surely have been written by now...then I turn on the radio and hear another song I know I can't live without.  I LOVE music :)