Jack Flash Jr wrote
We all have some songs that, when they come on, change everything everytime (there's many that do that for a lot of people, like Gimme Shelter). This song gives me a feeling of extreme well being... hell, the world actually looks completely different when it runs through my head:
There's all sorts of musical things that give me a high. Some of them very consistently so. I find it hard to not get excited, even happy ☹ when I hear Sandy Denny singing "Come All Ye". I don't even like that song, but there's such joy in her singing, in, it seems to me, the act of singing that I can't resist. Beethoven's "The Emperor" (I think that's the 5th Piano Concerto).... just a marvellous piece of music. Norma Waterson singing "The Moving On Song" (partly because of a memory I have of hearing her sing that live - utterly spell binding, and I probably wouldn't enjoy the recordings and youtube clips half as much without that memory). Richard Thompson and "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" (though not the later performances where he sounds a bit tired of it, but the original recording or, even better, the fab version on his live album
Two Letter Words). Led Zeppelin doing "Misty Mountain Hop"... such exuberance in the vocals. I can still remember the first time I heard Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover". The Stones.... "Get Of Off My Cloud" (Charlie rules). Blah blah blah. Etc etc etc.
Loads and loads.
It's music that's the drug I think. But on my terms, not when it's a pan pipes version of "The Sounds of Silence" being played in elevators or "Jumping Jack Flash" at 4 in the morning when the neighbours are having a party. I must confess that it doesn't change my life or my belief systems or anything like that. I'm of the Bruce Springsteen school - music can provide those transcendent moments that lift you out of the mundane.
You can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.
