Progressive Thoughts - Day 10

Today’s song is one of my all-time favourites by yet another band from Birmingham, the Moody Blues. I’m sure you have heard the song before – Nights In White Satin:

The song is basically a beautiful and emotional love song, the kind of song that I normally wouldn’t like. It’s not that I’m not romantic – I think I am. The problem is that I find generic love songs a little too contrived whose sole purpose is to rip your heart strings.

If you are just beginning a truly wonderful relationship, and everything is new, then perhaps love songs can express human feelings -  that is unless the lyrics are extremely corny.

If you have just broken up, or had a failed attempt to win over the heart of a fair maiden, then such songs can become your nemeses. 

There are one or two that I still cannot bear even a couple of decades after the event.  I am in a long term loving relationship with the woman who is “the one” and yet when I hear these songs, I feel like Satan himself has ripped out my heart and taken a big bite with a grin on his malevolent face.

That’s what love songs can do for you, dear reader.

So, how do these songs get into your head? Let me tell you.

I regard music as a surreal kind of time machine. A song can propel you back in time to your life at the time it was popular or had meaning in your life. You hear the opening notes of the song and a box of memories is opened in your mind that remind of the time you heard that song or when it was important in your life.

I have a vast collection of 1980’s songs that do just that, propelling me back to the time when I was young and when life was truly exciting; songs that remind me of good times, friends etc. but most of all that remind me of my successful and failed attempts to acquire a girlfriend – and there are far more times when I failed.

Any love song from that time will cause what is left of my heart to lurch but one two in particular invoke a mixture of rage and pain. It’s almost like a phobia. 

One of the artists responsible for the song in question specialises in the sugary nonsense that drips from loving youthful relationships. But they don’t prepare you for the inevitable pain. As a consequence of one particular incident, which I won’t relate for fear of bringing back more pain, I now refuse to listen to ANY songs by this artist. It’s not that I hate them – it’s just that their performances evoke that nasty bilious feeling of rejection and heartbreak.

There must be millions of people who hate certain songs and artists for the same reason.

Of course, on the other hand, there are some songs that loving couples regard as “our song”, and such love songs serve a purpose. The problem is that you both have to like the song. 

Mrs PM and I do not share the same taste in music and the truth is there aren’t any songs that we could regard as “our song”.

I have associated one or two from my collection with my lovely lady, but I can tell you all this for free – she will hate every single one of them.

I am certain it’s the same case the other way round too.

Nevertheless, I still love Nights in White Satin and I thank the Lord that I was too young to care less about women when it was released in the late 1960’s.

I’d hate to hate it.