Stuck in my head...

Sitting in the bright white light of my computer screen, in the silent evening, all the lights off, writing about my deepest, darkest secrets, I am listening to my Sad Songs playlist on the iPod, wondering about where my thoughts should be landing, and what kind of dreams will come of my whirling brainstorms.

Sad songs, or at least what I call sad songs, speak to my soul, and I want to cry out and sing along at the top of my lungs. Sad song lyrics sit on my chest like an animal, weighing me down, making it hard to breathe. I love that feeling; I love wallowing in it and letting the pain in the singers' voices wash over me like a rain storm.

I don't know if most people listen to song lyrics the way I do--I need to know each word, and why it was chosen, and then I want to ruminate in all the words together and know how the songwriter was feeling as she wrote.

I don't remember the first song I memorized all the words to. I do remember spending several hours in high school at Jennifer Catt's house with my hand on the rewind button of a CD boom box, listening to Lisa Loeb and learning all the words to "Stay," and trying to sing it with the exact same inflection in my voice as she did. I broke the radio in my Pontiac Grand Am (making out with a boy in a parking lot) when Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album was in the cassette player, and the tape played for months in a loop, until I could sing every word to every song, and had the entire tape memorized, including the amount of milliseconds between songs and the key change between tunes. I memorized all the words to the fast part of "Hook" by Blues Traveler so that I could recite it as a monologue on command (a skill I totally copied from my high school youth group director, because I thought both she and the idea of having a trademark monologue were beyond cool--let me know if you want to hear it; I did an improptu rehearsal the other day and didn't skip a beat).

When I hear a song I love, I want to know it, and to live it. I still spend my driving time in the car rewinding CDs to hear a line again, until I can imitate the whole thing, turns of phrase and breaths included. I imagine my life in a series of vignettes set to music, like a video on MTV. I always have a song stuck in my head, 24 hours a day. If you stop me in the hallway or on the street and ask what song is playing, I'll never let you down (go ahead: try it). Sometimes it is an advertising jingle, but there's always music playing in my inner ears.

I don't know what it is about music that hits right at my core--I know that I gravitate to artists with complex and meaningful lyrics, and that I prefer singers that I can imitate (so Christina Aguleira and Beyonce are usually not at the top of my list--both are talented singers, so much so that I can't compete, so I don't even try).

I heard an interesting story from WNYC's Radio Lab about people who hear music so loudly in their heads that it seems real. Thankfully I don't hear this music in my head THAT loudly, but I do think, if I had to have any kind of debilitating condition, I'd like to have this one.

I'll leave some lyrics from one of my favorite sad songs with you as the end of my post. If you have some sad songs you'd like to share, please let me know so I can add them to my playlist.


And oh, the fear I've known, that I might reap the praise of strangers and end up on my own. All I've sung was a song, but maybe I was wrong....

I am alone in a hotel room tonight. I squeeze the sky out, but there's not a star appears. Begin my studies with this paper and this pencil, and I'm working through the grammar of my fears. --Indigo Girls, "Language or the Kiss"