It happens to everybody: A song pops into your head and you can’t get rid of it. We call those “earworms,” and I’ve had my share. The other day while I was folding clean laundry, a song popped into my head. No biggie, right? Well…I don’t think I’d heard this song in almost fifty years. I didn’t remember the artist. I remembered about a third of the lyrics, but the instruments came through clear as a bell, including the interlude that had no lyrics. From the lyrics, I guessed its title was “A Special Kind of Morning.”
Curious, I looked in all my Whitburn pop song references, and found no such title listed. After it ran a few times in my head I had the insight that it was on one of my college-years 8” recorded off-the-air reel-to-reel mix tapes. I still have the typewritten index for those tapes, and yup, there it was, recorded in March, 1970. The artist was Joe Brooks. I listened to those tapes until I left home in early 1976, so that may have been when I heard the song last. I did a DDG search and there it was (like so many other obscure pop songs from that era) free on YouTube.
So. Why that song? And why then? I was folding my socks and underwear, sheesh. It was a typical pop song of no special quality, with dumb lyrics. Of several adjectives I might apply to it, “memorable” was not one of them.
My sister has a name for this sort of thing: brain sludge. She gets it too. I’m going to apply a slightly different name to it, and make it a category here on Contra: Scraps. That’s what they are: Scraps of memory that surface for no apparent reason. I have a notefile containing a few examples from recent years. I’ll present them here as time permits. All of them are peculiar, and one is definitely weird.
Stay tuned.
[…] haven’t done a piece on scraps in a couple of years, so if you didn’t see it back in 2023, here’s a link to where I define it. Basically, stuff that pops into your head without a trigger or other reason. Happens to me all the […]
Well, I bounced over to this essay after reading the most recent. The YT link you posted is dead, but this one works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1KzaFjiKgQ — and the song is interesting in a number of ways.
The production quality particularly interested me. There is something more organic and less clinical about that production. It is not perfect. The singers are not always on pitch (but not off badly). It’s a good song, too. I listened to the melody line and chord changes are there are few surprises in there. That makes the song more interesting.
Thanks for posting.
NB: I decided to try an HTML paragraph element in my comment to see if I can introduce a break. I’ll know soon if that worked. 😉