It happens to everybody: A song pops into your head and you can\u2019t get rid of it. We call those \u201cearworms,\u201d and I\u2019ve had my share. The other day while I was folding clean laundry, a song popped into my head. No biggie, right? Well\u2026I don\u2019t think I\u2019d heard this song in almost fifty years. I didn\u2019t 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 \u201cA Special Kind of Morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cmemorable\u201d was not one of them.<\/p>\n My sister has a name for this sort of thing: brain sludge<\/em>. She gets it too. I\u2019m going to apply a slightly different name to it, and make it a category here on Contra: Scraps<\/em>. That\u2019s what they are: Scraps of memory that surface for no apparent reason. I have a notefile containing a few examples from recent years. I\u2019ll present them here as time permits. All of them are peculiar, and one is definitely weird.<\/p>\n Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It happens to everybody: A song pops into your head and you can\u2019t get rid of it. We call those \u201cearworms,\u201d and I\u2019ve had my share. The other day while I was folding clean laundry, a song popped into my head. No biggie, right? Well\u2026I don\u2019t think I\u2019d heard this song in almost fifty years. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[254],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scraps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4867,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions\/4867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}