I finally asked the question I’ve wanted to ask a commercial business for a long time: “Do you play this music because you like it, or do you play it because you believe customers such as me like it?”
I’ve noticed over the past decade that many stores, restaurants, offices and even medical facilities have music playing in the background from the 1970s and ’80s. That’s my sweet spot for popular, secular music because that’s when I was in junior high, high school, college and young adulthood. The songs from those two decades are burned into my memory to the point that I’ve found it hard to warm up to current music.
The songs from the past are heavy with memories, both good and bad. Often the songs are tied to the phases of relationships: eager imaginings, first dates, special moments, breakups. Sometimes they conjure up wistful feelings when everything was in front of me and anything was possible.
Sometimes I hear a song and I can see and smell a place and the people that were a part of it. If I close my eyes, I can almost put myself there – which is a problem if I’m listening to an oldies station while driving. Sometimes a song can touch a nerve so deep and tender that my emotions well up inside. Sometimes it’ll bring tears to my eyes. And sometimes it’ll make me smile or laugh out loud.
This week I was at a dermatology specialist’s office getting my ear cut on, as I wrote about last week, and I noticed they were playing a nice mix of music from those two decades. The doctor is probably about 40 years old, so I knew he didn’t grow up with these songs. He also was new to me, so I let us get to know each other first and waited awhile before I asked the question. In fact, I waited until he was examining my ear to compliment the playlist and ask: “Do you play this music because you like it, or do you play it because you believe that patients such as me like it?”
“It’s a little of both,” he said, and then he told me how he and other doctors in his specialty have discussed their office music choices, and he told me that occasionally a patient will complain about the playlist or a particular song that they say is inappropriate. And then he laughed and said, “Maybe the funniest one was a few days ago when we heard a song with the lyric, ‘Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you.’”
That would be Paul Young singing “Everytime You Go Away” from 1985. And yes, that was pretty funny, but even more funny or ironic was the song playing at that very moment: Pink Floyd’s “Brain Surgery” with the line, “You raise the blade, you make the change.” As I mentioned that, he was leaning over my head, cutting flesh off my ear. Others came to mind from that era – “Cuts Like a Knife” by Bryan Adams, “The First Cut is the Deepest” sung by Rod Stewart – but I kept that to myself.
Later in the day a friend alerted me to the death of Dave Mason, a musician he said he had a run-in with back in the day while writing a concert review for a newspaper. He said he wanted “to punch his lights out” at the time. I responded, “What set you off; did you just disagree?” riffing on a line from Mason’s best-known song, “We Just Disagree.”
I thought I was being clever, but then I listened to that song later in the day and was blindsided by memories. My eyes got watery and I swallowed hard, recalling the feelings I had during my first semester in college when that song hit the airwaves. It was a season of fresh starts with new friends, new experiences and new challenges. With the opening lines, “Been away, haven’t seen you in a while. How’ve you been, have you changed your style?,” the song had me thinking about people so important to me at the time but I’d not seen them in decades.
And that’s the mystery and magic of music. Whether secular or religious, whether singing along with the radio in the car on the way to school or with the congregation at church, there’s a power in the words and melodies that stir memories of when they were first heard, when they touched something deep inside, adhered to our consciousness and became a part of who we are.