When the Music Moves You

I get obsessed with songs now and then. I can listen to it over and over and over (when no one's around to be annoyed). I hear the music even when it's off, I have the lyrics in my head all the time. Lately I've been getting that way with the entire Scrubs soundtrack, which I got for Christmas. A mostly mellow, occasionally downer album, it's got some great stuff on it, probably not much you'd be familiar with, even if you do watch the series. I'm not certain, but I think this is from the first season, maybe first and second. Sometimes songs inspire a sort of video in my head - kind of like, if I were a music video director, this is what I'd film. But one song on this album, "Good Life" by Francis Dunnery, is so achingly, longingly beautiful that after I listened to it a couple of times and got the lyrics in my head, I want to write a movie that will feature this song in the big emotional climactic moment. Clearly, this movie would not have a happy ending, or at best, a bittersweet one. Lyrics are here, you can hear a sample of it going to the Amazon page and scrolling down. Why do some songs really speak to us and others not: the music, the lyrics, the mood when we first heard it? Would I love this song as much with a different melody? Maybe we all have "the one that got away": the person we left because we knew we weren't right together, even if we wanted it to be. Of course, I know several people who married that person instead of letting them get away, believe me, it leads to bigger sorrow, but not better songs. Maybe the rest of the album got me in the mood to hear this song, if it had been the first one on the disk, maybe I'd think "Man, that's kind of depressing" and move on. Good songs are an intricate fusion of just the right sound, rhythm, melody, lyrics and voice. They make you wonder where the songwriter was (in several respects) and stay with you in a more meaningful way than the bubblegum ones that just get stuck in your head.