Recovered Melodies

 

When a song is stuck in your head, you probably have a surefire way to get rid of it. We all do. There’s the tried-and-true method of passing it on to an unsuspecting set of ears. The hope there is that like the proverbial steaming potato, once it’s someone else’s problem, it’s no longer yours. You can start to hum it in public place to provoke an angry confrontation with strangers. The logic behind this technique is much like punching your hand when your foot is asleep. Give your body something else to worry about. Should you get pummeled by an ever-increasing crowd of howling lunatics, the last thing on your mind will be whatever jingle was initially driving you crazy. Instead, your focus will be fixed on the expiration date or your tube of Neosporin. 

That’s one thing. It’s one thing when you have someone else to blame – like a billionaire pop singer and their cohort of tech-savvy entrepreneurs manufacturing catchy songs by the dozen daily. Where’s the Upton Sinclair exposé of these tune-packing maestros when we need it? But again, that’s different. At least during these music-induced fits of psychosis you have a song to enjoy. A beat to whistle. A chorus to slap along with your knee. What concerns me most is something much more dire. 

What do you do when you want nothing more than a jingle rattling around your head, but can’t seem to remember a good one? And whatever you do, it won’t appear. This is the sort of problem you might not even know you have. That’s until a person in your general vicinity uses a word like “harmonica.” You start thinking, “what does a harmonica sound like again? Can someone remind me please?”

Luckily, I’ve devised a therapy around recovered melodies. Songs that, for whatever reason, have been repressed for some time. Before I started this, I had no idea just how many Rihanna songs I knew by heart. But they were there all along, waiting for me to find them. This therapy is a great way to discover that you were, contrary to what your yearbook says, rather cool in high school. The therapy itself isn’t all that interesting. It involves board certified psychologists humming various pop songs in your presence and recording the reaction to ones you’ve supposedly never heard. 

The good doctors goad you with sharps, flats and familiar chord progressions, all effort aimed towards getting you to sing something. If that doesn’t work, there’s always the possibility of an electronic boost to your memory. Picture a more musical take on classic shock treatments. When no songs are recalled, they take an amp cord that’s usually plugged into a guitar and find an orifice to lodge it. That’s when the melodies usually start to rush in. Due to either the amazing powers of projection or the threat of a 75 minute Jerry Garcia guitar solo. Whatever works, right?