I traded up my MP3 player from a 512k to a 2 gig model. I had a shitload of CDs, you wouldn't believe the genre range, and all of them have been ripped to MP3s...close to 2000 tracks. That, of course, means there's a shitload of tracks I never hear. I figure 2 gigs is enough to let me throw some random directories of music in there and set the thing to shuffle.
One of the directories that landed on the thing held the tracks for Regina Bell's Reaching Back.
I love listening to Regina Bell. But this...
The particular track, a cover of the Delphonics' (?) Hurry Up This Way Again strikes me when she sings it. I don't know why...it's not like I've ever played the role she sings of. When she reaches the crescendo, that word "Nobody"
hurts.
And nothing else brings that out in me. No song, no person, no situation. I had forgotten how that felt. I don't think I like it.
It is amazing how a particular song or melody can strike such a deep and fundamental chord in our being and we are left awestruck by its affect and bewildered by how or why it happened. There is a song titled "Deep Forest" that was written probably 70 or 75 years ago by Andy Razaf and Eubie Blake that somehow brings me to tears or very close to tears everytime I listen to Earl "Fatha" Hines' solo piano recording of the song.
Hines orginally recorded this tune with his band back in the 1930s but he rerecorded it more than 30 years later as a solo piano piece. The full band version doesn't sound the least bit melancholy but somehow nearly four decades later Hines plays the same song at a slightly faster tempo and manages to infuse it with such a profound feeling of melancholy that it causes me to cry. This is a deep and peculiar genius that some folks have and though I am mnot religious I keep thinking that their talent must be God given.