Earworm Analysis: My First Song

This is a very special episode of my blog where I actually share a personal story rather than just a list of whatever I've seen/read lately. Gird your loins!

Circa 1985, my parents got this eight-track player and a bunch of eight-tracks (an ancient technology, even in that ancient year) at this rickety place we were spending the summer. And one of my earliest memories was seeing Dionne Warwick's Promises, Promises eight-track and putting it in the player and the title song came on. 

Looked about like this.

I had no frame of reference for what music was, but I liked the noise it made. And I jumped around with the playing mechanism (eight-tracks are weird, I still don't understand them) until I found the title track again and I would listen to it over and over. Never cared about the rest of the album. This was the song.

But here's the part where it got weird: I always assumed that song was a huge hit. It had to be, right? I was telling my wife about it and Googled Dionne Warwick and a list of her songs came up and I scrolled down looking for "Promises, Promises." After a ton of scrolling, I still hadn't found it. Wha?

I'd never heard of her other songs. But admittedly, I wasn't a Warwick fan. So I just Googled the song title and found it and played it for my wife. I hadn't heard it in over three decades. Turns out Burt Bacharach wrote it, so it's got a strong big-band vibe to it. Decent lyrics. It's okay. 

But then I looked up the album on Wikipedia and it turns out Promises, Promises was Warwick's 11th album. It's a nonexistent blip on her career radar. There was like one radio hit on there and it wasn't the title track. So it was surreal because I always thought Promises, Promises was Warwick's biggest hit album and the title track one of her biggest songs because it was the only one I knew by her...but it was NOTHING! 

I'm having a hard time articulating how weird it was to find this out. I might have to write a book about the mental reversal it did on me.

My parents happened to visit last weekend and I asked them about that whole setup and my dad was like, "Oh yeah, we randomly bought that eight-track player and a handful of eight-tracks from some garage sale, just for the heck of having a music player over the summer." So the album meant NOTHING to them, either!

To their credit, one of those eight-tracks was Elton John's greatest hits, which had the SECOND song I was ever over-and-over addicted to: "Bennie and the Jets." I still totally back that song. And just about every song on that album. ("Rocket Man" is a bit played out, though.)

My subsequent first cassette that I ever owned was not cool and I have no bragging rights, but to keep it real: it was the Young Einstein soundtrack. Almost none of it holds up, except for this song, which was my over-and-over fave on there and to this day makes me drop whatever I'm multitasking with, pay attention, and feel something vaguely melancholy and beyond my grasp deep in my soul every time it pops up on a mix CD or shuffle mode.


-Phony McFakename

 

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