Although the onset of tinnitus and partial deafness mean that I listen to music sparingly these days – "listen" in the sense of actually putting a CD into the stereo (and I'm afraid I will always think of whatever a music-playing machine is actually called as a "stereo") – I do nonetheless frequently dip into my bookmarked YouTube musical offerings and even explore their accompanying suggested playlists while I'm sitting here at my computer trying to think up fresh ways of continuing this self-imposed Reithian mission to inform, educate, and entertain. It seems that pair of cheap little desktop speakers don't rattle my hearing apparatus quite so badly.
I don't know how typical this is, but I am highly susceptible to that irritating phenomenon known as an "earworm" or, less disgustingly, "involuntary musical imagery" (INMI): songs and tunes that become an inescapable inner soundtrack, in my case sometimes lasting for days. I regularly find myself singing and humming along sotto voce to the same song, quite often finding in the process that I haven't yet got the tune or the lyrics – particularly the phrasing – quite right. For a long time I was tormented by Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", for example, but I think I've got it down now. Nonetheless, that song with its tricksy guitar accompaniment still takes up residence in my head whenever I hear it, or even when just a fragment of the lyrics flickers into consciousness. [1] Add to that the dozens of other mental musical squatters in there and it can feel like I'm a walking jukebox, but an annoying one that tends to get stuck, playing the same track over and over on repeat.
Regular readers will know that I have often mentioned the music of Jackson Browne. I wouldn't describe myself as a "fan" – apart from the two-CD Solo Acoustic collection, I haven't bought an actual album since 1973's For Everyman – but there are individual tracks from across his entire subsequent output, mainly encountered via streaming or on YouTube, that have come to take a significant place in my personal playlist. Curiously, Jackson Browne was a dormant taste I only rediscovered as recently as 2010 (as described in the post Something Fine), and generally these "later" songs – i.e. released after 1973! – are heavy-duty numbers like "The Barricades of Heaven" or "Sky Blue and Black". When you're in the mood for lugubrious soul-searching, nobody does it quite like Jackson Browne.
However, when I've been feeling the need for a little light musical snack lately, I've been playing this engaging short video on YouTube of Bonnie Raitt and long-time Browne sideman David Lindley rehearsing "Everywhere I Go", a bouncy, reggae-style number they were recording for a Jackson Browne tribute album. Watch the video, and I suspect you'll be humming it for days, too, everywhere you go. Yes, it seems there's always room for one more rent-free tenant in my involuntary musical lodging-house. Plus, if my own "INMI" experience is anything to go by, parts of the tune and phrasing are trickier to get right than you might think. Damn, I've started to hum it again already. People say I must be a fool...
