I am obsessive by nature, as I may have mentioned several hundred times before, and I even had a full-blown, honest-to-pete obsession with a boy once, as I’ve mentioned in passing (and I think that’s the only way I’m ever going to mention it; I might write the story down someday, but not here). But that’s not the sort of obsession I am referring to at the moment.
No, right now I am in the grip of a much simpler, and much more pleasant (you could even call it beautiful, if you weren’t afraid of sounding like a Leonard Cohen song title) obsession. My life has been taken over by a song. I don’t mean that there’s a song stuck in my head; that’s a much more common occurrence, and I get earworms —I love that term, which sounds even better in the original German: Ohrwurm—pretty regularly, like most people. Earworms are easily treatable, however, at least for me.* This is different. Not only is the song in question playing over and over again in my head, I’m also spending a lot of time thinking about the song—not so much what it means, since the lyrics are both oblique (lots of obscure allusions and unexpected word combinations) and transparent (it’s about having your heart broken), or about its special relevance to my life (it’s about a breakup, which mercifully has no relevance to my life at the moment), but more about how beautiful it is and how I could have lived this long without having it in my life and how many times I should allow myself to play it in a given hour.
The song is “Since K Got Over Me” by the Clientele, who are my new favorite band even more than the everybodyfields and the Morning After Girls are my new favorite band.And I think I’ve listened to it about eight times per day, on average, all week long, through various means—the stream on their Website, the one on their Myspace page (if you look at the stats that tell you how many plays their songs have gotten on the day of your visit, figure about 40 percent of them are me), and of course the iPod. I’ve even decided to order the actual record that it comes from, even though I legally downloaded it from eMusic and therefore have already paid a little bit for it. This may seem to be in violation of my recently imposed rule that I can’t buy CDs that can be legally downloaded from eMusic or the iTunes Music Store unless I really need the package, but the fact is, I need the package. I need the cover art, which looks cool from the small, blurry images I’ve seen on various sites, and I need the lyric sheet if there is one, although the lyrics are quite easy to decipher, and I need photos of the band, not because I think they’re hot but because I want to know which one is which. Specifically, I want to know which one Alasdair Maclean, the singer (and lyricist, I think), is, because his voice has temporarily taken over my life.
It’s that having-a-crush-on-a-record thing all over again, except that, though I am in love with the album as a whole, I am truly obsessed with this one song. In the best possible way…though it is beginning to make me slightly delirious. Fortunately, I’ve been almost as obsessed with a totally different song these past few weeks—Phyllis Boyens’s version of Jean Ritchie’s amazing “Blue Diamond Mines,” which I think I might put up on the Twangblog if I get around to it tonight—so I can switch back and forth between the two to keep from going completely loopy. So far, at least.
*(I have a foolproof—seriously, foolproof, never fails—method for chasing them away: I think of my favorite Beatles song, “And Your Bird Can Sing,” which is so catchy and so intricate that just hearing it my head chases away any pesky transitory earworm. I can’t guarantee that this will work for anyone else, however.)