“So what’s your favorite song?” It’s a question I often ask people and glance as they shuffle their brains trying to come up with the right answer. It is almost as if the person I am asking the question to thinks it is some kind of a test. I say this because when they do answer the question…they make it sound like they are asking me a question. “Crazy by Patsy Cline?”
Shockingly loves music. All kinds of music. No lie. But there is more to my question than meets the ear, yes.
I believe you can tell a lot about a person from their favorite song; and it’s ALL GOOD…so just answer the question. There is no right answer. There is no wrong answer. There is only the answer.
So why all this about someone’s favorite song? Okay…Here’s why.
For those who know me, they know I love to joke around and make a laugh wherever I can…but on the flip side…I can go pretty deep; so much so that it freaks people out. Years ago, (when an honest question was mistaken for a lack of tact), I would just come out and ask someone “So what is the one thing you want more than anything in life right now?” “Do you ever feel like you are the only person in the world and ya just wish you could connect with SOMEONE…ya know, to where ya felt like your souls were fusing together in the utmost combination of love, life, and serenity? Like their thoughts were your thoughts and all that existed was a harmonious glow of existence?” The eyes would get wider, the posture would change, and there was a hell of a good chance my calls would not get taken again.
Years later, I found it was best to keep it simple and start small “whats your favorite thing to do when you are not at work?”….”Seen any good movies lately?”….”Whats your favorite song?”
When I ask this question to someone, there are two things we can be sure of:
1. I want to know YOU; not the you that is ‘put on’ to make things work…YOU…that person who feels the same way I do but was told to ‘pipe it’ cuz yer freakin people out.
2. As humans, music is one of our truest forms of expression; and we express ourselves through music. So yeah, I am being sneaky about it…but darn it…we only have a few years here for ‘training’ if you look at life on the whole…and I want to connect with as many people as possible. I need to be on Gods ‘Good side’. Who knows, maybe he will offer me a position amongst the perceptive heavens; preferably with a sweet view of the Grand Canyon every morning at sun-up.
When you tell me your favorite song….your REAL favorite song; the one that defines YOU and who YOU are (not whats popular at the moment). I am looking for that song in which you say to yourself… “That’s me”! (Unless of course, Pink’s “You and Your Hand” is indeed your favorite track…in that case, I’ll skip the handshake for a knuckle bump and some skin sanitizer).
For me, my favorite song is: ‘Windmills’ by Toad the Wet Sprocket. Not a popular one, I am sure…but I can listen to that song 5 times over and think every time that the band wrote that after reading about my life. …they didn’t, of course. The song is actually about Don Quixote and his pal, Sancho.
This made even more sense when I got the story on the song. You see, I dug Don Quixote’s style. He was a romantic (who many deemed insane) and road around the countryside with his only friend, Sancho. He did stuff not many people understood, was made fun of, was cast out of towns for no good reason other that he was ‘different’…but he believed in romanticism, love, honor, truth, chivalry….the whole experience.
In the story (as literary masters have more or less decided)…Don had this woman; the love of his life and most beautiful vision of woman who ever set her silken foot on the soil of this earth. Her name was Dulcinea and he spoke of her often. Thing is, she never really ‘appears’ in any real form in the story. It is almost as if (as one continues to read and starts putting it together themselves), that Don was so nuts about this ideal he was looking for that his brain constructed this perfect woman as a safety muse for Don to explain why he was such a romantic. …maybe his brain thought that if he had something to live for, he wouldn’t keep doing things like chasing and charging windmills on horseback….and we ALL know how that feels.
Yet, for all of Don’s craziness…for all of the townspeople that just thought he was weird; that Don Quixote made them so uncomfortable they wanted nothing more than to have him out of their town….two things are for certain:
For his travels and travails…a novel was written about him…it’s a globally renown classic.
One man wanted to believe in Don so badly…he stuck with him because this ‘crazy romantic dream’ of Quixote’s was so perfect that he just wanted ‘in’….that was his partner, Sancho.
So what I got out of that story was that Don Quixote is all of us; chasing some crazy dream and vision (our own Dulcinea) and doing things the world sometimes thinks are just plain dumb. Thank god because of Facebook and bad TV, they don’t see us screw up so much…but we do.
“Windmills” by Toad the Wet Sprocket was always a song I considered mine…and when I heard who they really wrote it about…that’s when I could listen to it 5 times in a row and smile though each playing.
“Take the darkest hour; break it open” is my favorite lyric from the song. That is something I feel we all need to do. Take your darkest time, crack it open, laugh until its right, and don’t stop searching for what you (or I) want. …let em think you’re crazy…you just may have a novel written about you one day and some guy writing at 3 o’clock in the morning about how he wished he was strong enough to have been YOU.
So there’s my favorite song. What’s your favorite song?
–C
