I forgot what got me onto the train of thought; perhaps I thought of my aunt, whose antique mall furniture refurbishing business might be called Wildfire Studios (not the video game producing company), but I remembered a song called “Wildfire” from my youth. I mean, you heard it a bunch in the middle seventies and into the 1980s on easy listening stations but which has fallen off of Jack (a dated radio format term) playlists which play the best of the 1980s, 1990s, and today, which means an entire catalog of 70s music has fallen into a hole unless you’re looking for it on YouTube. Or that’s what I would project based on my broadcast radio listening habits.
Then, yesterday, I heard it on the XMSirius Dentist Office station.
Which, I know, is a cognitive trick: I was just thinking about the song, and I heard it soon thereafter, so it sticks in my mind (and on my blog). I think of a lot of songs that I don’t hear soon thereafter unless I bring it up here for blogfodder (see also “Hearts” by Marty Balin).
When you leave YouTube’s autoplay on, it presents you another similar song. In this case, after “Wildfire”, it presented “Please Come To Boston”, another wistful ballad I remember from my innocent years. Ah, even more impactful than a wistful ballad is a wistful ballad from the past, wherein a lot of the stuff wisted is now wast.
(The third up on autoplay was “The Same Old Lang Syne” by Dan Fogelberg, which gave me the power to hit the stop button before we got to, as we certainly would, “The Cat’s In The Cradle” by Harry Chapin, and I would have to trade the longing for my absent father from the then to the concern that I am too absent of a father now.
Fortunately, I have a new Crobot CD to listen to very loud to distract me.
