When I was a child it was a big treat to see vaudeville in the Strand Theater in Syracuse, NY. One of the performers was a clarinetist named Ted Lewis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lewis_(musician)) who would materialise on stage shouting, "Is everehbuddy happeh?" With his battered black hat and his squashed-nose, whiskey-reddened face he radiated cheer. Lewis' closing number was "Me and My Shadow" sung while he danced on stage with his own, spotlight-generated, shadow. It was during the depression, and there was sadness behind the forced gaiety and Lewis' sentimental schmaltz.

The song starts:

Me and my shadow,
Strolling down the avenue,
Me and my shadow,
Not a soul to tell our troubles to . . .

And when it's twelve o'clock,
We climb the stair,
We never knock,
For nobody's there . . .

When I lived alone I would often think of the above when I came back to my apartment alone in a sad mood. Later I worked at the Johnson Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania with a device to record fetal heartbeats. Attached by electrodes to a pregnant woman it would record and/or transmit the sounds of the heartbeats of the fetus. Murray Adelman and I tested it by singing "Me and My Shadow" and playing it back. Then we took it to a Philadelphia hospital and recorded the fetal heartbeat coming from a woman in labour. I held her hand to comfort her, and she squeezed my hand back. We organised a demonstration so the doctors would become familiar with the equipment. The doctor demonstrating the equipment switched on the wrong channel so the strains of "Me and My Shadow" went out over the lecture hall instead of the expected heartbeat. When our lugubrious tremolo got to "We never knock" a wave of laughter swept through the assemblage. Somehow the old song no longer brings sadness.

Sadness brings rejection and deeper sadness, as the sad one is isolated. Joy is expansive and draws others in. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and your beer is diluted.

Do you have an association with a song?

How very serrendipitous! Just this evening I was watching a re-run of the movie Tootsie. In all these years I had never watched it again as I remembered that I had disliked it intensly. But to-night, well, I was cooking and I wanted some background noise. Actually, it didn't seem so loathsome as I had always thought it was.

It was only when it ended and a song which had featured in it was replayed against the credits that I suddently realised - it was not the movie I had hated (though Hoffman's somewhat robotish walk as a female character was somewhat annoying)- it was that song!

I had watched the movie originally at a period in my life when I was absolutely hopeless and honestly thought that my life, for all intents and purposes, was over. The words of the song - celebrating finding a somebody and the resultant happy-ever-after-ness - had seemed like a cruel parody of the situation I was then in and could see no way out of.

Now, all this time later, I watched the movie (admittedly multi-tasking) and the song was absolutely meaningless one way or another. "Just another Stupid Love song" so to speak. I hadn't hated the movie at all: but hearing the song once more brought back those other times and caused me to laugh out loud at how my life had changed so radically and in every aspect, that it seemed remarkable I had ever been that other person!

As a teen, I used to love The Smiths' "There is a light and it never goes out."

Take me out tonight
Where theres music and theres people
And theyre young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I havent got one
Anymore

Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and i
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please dont drop me home
Because its not my home, its their
Home, and Im welcome no more

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine

Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I dont care
I dont care, I dont care
And in the darkened underpass
I thought oh god, my chance has come at last
(but then a strange fear gripped me and i
Just couldnt ask)

Also 'Captain' by Something for Kate brings back childhood issues...

I built an aeroplane
It was just like the real ones that i saw when i was younger
But it was too small for me
To crawl inside the cockpit and fly away
At a million miles an hour

And it took me years
Underneath the house we lived in
I threw my head and my heart in the cockpit
The sounds of the engines
The voices from upstairs i only heard my crew
Preparing me for take off!

It's just a model
Built with plastic and with glue
But every day i go down to the airport
And i fly away from
I fly away from you

Hahaha I shouldn't say this but I can also smell cocaine and feel the numbness in my nose and throat when I lsten to The Strokes Is This It. Man we played that over and over in my flat in London. Ha so cliched.

Something for Kate have some good cynical songs about corporate slavery that really appeal...

'Jerry Stand up'

Jerry Stand up
pull back the curtains and let some light in
quit your job
because you hate it and it's wasting you

once upon a time you were running
singing to the ground every morning
once upon a time you were..

jerry stand up
am i the only one who's noticed that you've been missing
remember yourself man
remember that you have chance and possibility

once upon a time you were running
singing to the ground every morning
once upon a time you were crazy

jerry
you're not getting any younger
all you need is fresh air
a nice new suit and a walk in the park every day or two
every day in every way...

'Twenty Years'

he is alive and kicking
he calls it gymnastics, calls it velocity
and you spend twenty years climbing and never change your mind
and you call it the path of least resistance
and you have everything you ever need

and you sing if you can't beat them join them
all the way up to your floor
memorize and repeat it
and sing it like you mean it

they are talking to me and i am nowhere to be found
there's somewhere else i had to be
call it necessity, mutiny, entropy

they think i'm down
they tell me i should brighten up
but that's just 'cause they don't know an explosion when they see one

and they sing if you can't beat them join them
all the way up to your floor
memorize and repeat it
and sing it like you mean it
all the way home to your front door
yeah you better believe it
sing it like you mean it

Houllebecq,

I sure am learning something. I used to listen to my grandmother's windup victrola which played her record collection - mainly opera and songs of WW1. I stopped listening to pop music when the Beatles and Elvis arrived on the scene. Once I was a young fogey. Where are the snows of yesterday? Sniffed up the nose. I guess.

Songs - old songs, songs of another time - are like smells, instantly recreating a vivid experience as if it just happened a minute ago.

My earliest musical memory is from the wind-up gramophone era too. Takes me back to my grandmother's front room, where I was exiled of a Sunday afternoon while the grown-ups talked.

"The Three Bells" by Les Compagnons de la Chanson. I can hear it now...

"There's a vee-layge, heeden deep in the var-lay, a-mong the pahn trees half forlorn..."

Yep. Powerful stuff.