The Thinkulum

Every once in a while I hear a piece of music that grabs my attention and not only doesn’t let go but also doesn’t reveal its identity. I usually hear them on a commercial or in the grocery store or some other place without a DJ or a playlist. It would be one thing if there were lyrics I could look up on the Internet, but most of the music that appeals to me is purely instrumental. How frustrating. So usually I end up playing or humming it to a bunch of people and asking if they’ve ever heard it. That never works. Obviously the people I hang around with do not have my musical tastes. So if I ever figure out what a piece of mystery music is, it’s usually by accident and usually years after I first heard it. I’m getting more aggressive in my hunt, however, so those mean little songs have less of a chance.

The latest mystery had the shortest life-span yet. The song came from a game I played over Christmas called Friends Beyond 1. The author used a number of ear-catching MIDIs, but this one won the prize. Its melody completely haunted me. And I only knew it as a file called “6.mid.” Well, the past few days I have been listening to some of the trance stations at Live 365, just for something different. Usually I listen to ambient, new age, or classical. Okay, it’s not that different, but anyway. So there I was just a little while ago, minding my own business, when I heard the opening notes of a familiar tune. I was so stunned I can’t remember what I was doing just before that. I have a needle-in-a-haystack mentality toward finding music, especially since the things that appeal to me seem obscure. They’re not the kind of thing that makes the top 40. And I don’t listen to much music, relatively speaking, so a lot of times I don’t really know how to classify the music I hear and where the best place would be to start looking for it. I wouldn’t have pegged this song as trance, but all of a sudden there it was. So I excitedly switched over to the playlist–“Robert Miles – Children (Dream Version) [6:59] – Dreamland.” I’d never heard of it, obviously. But I looked it up on Amazon and bookmarked it in my “Stuff to Buy” folder. Not surprisingly, the CD had really good reviews on Amazon. So that’s another one off my list. At some point I’m going to put samples of my mystery songs on the site so nice people can come along and tell me what they are. It’s always an experience when the names of these songs are revealed to me. It’s like discovering the secrets of the universe or finding a long-lost sibling I never knew I had.