Have you ever had an experience where by pure coincidence, the music you’re listening to just happens to be the prefect soundtrack for what’s happening at that moment?
Years ago, actually over a decade ago now, I had to travel to the Seattle area for work. After a rather stressful week I driving my rental car back to the airport, radio tuned to a classic rock station, very relieved to be finally heading back home. As I neared the exit for Seatac Airport, I looked to my left and saw a Delta 767 on final approach, and at that exact moment the song “Jet Airliner” started playing on the radio. That coincidence really made my day.
The closing music of the Huntley-Brinkley Report (evening news) was the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9. We were watching it one evening in the 60s, and a thunderstorm was moving in. At the beginning of the music, at the exact moment the tympani entered, there was a peal of thunder.
It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what song came on the car radio when my wife and I were driving to the airport to catch a flight to San Francisco. (Hint - we didn’t put flowers in our hair.)
Last October, I had to have my dog Reggie put to sleep at the vet. He had been a pretty hyper dog. As I was driving away, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” played on the radio.
A few days after my mother passed away I was awakened to my clock radio playing Bare Naked Ladies’ Call and Answer, a song I had never heard in my life. It was some months before I discovered what the song was, partially owing to the fact that I thought it was Depeche Mode
Anyway, the chorus is
“And if you call
I will answer
And if you fall
I’ll pick you up
And if you court this disaster
I’ll point you home
I’ll point you home”
It was heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time.
One day I was trying to figure out a word in an Elton John song. I listened to it over and over and couldn’t figure it out. That evening I met someone from England and we were talking about words that were different in the two countries, like boot/trunk. She mentioned the English pronunciation of garage (which I hadn’t heard before). I realized that was the word I spent an hour or so that day trying to figure out.
By the way, the song was Levon.
At some point in my senior year in high school, I began to think, after a couple coincidental juxtapositions, that hearing the live version of Bob Seger’s ‘Beautiful Loser’ on the radio was a sign that the girl I was dating at the time was about to break up with me. I wasn’t that superstitious, and I understood the concept of ‘Confirmation Bias’, if not the actual term— I knew that once something became significant you tended to notice it more often, like noticing the model of a car you just bought everywhere you go. Still, if the live version of ‘Travelin’ Man’ came on the radio, which segued into ‘Beautiful Loser’, I’d change the channel before it went into BL, juuuust to be on the safe side.
So I was dating a girl the summer before I started college. Toward the end of the summer we were parked somewhere, talking in my car, and I told her about the Beautiful Loser curse. She said that’s silly, and turned on the radio to one of our local rock stations to show me there wasn’t anything to it. But of course she tuned in right when the radio was playing the live version of “Beautiful Loser” at that very moment. So we kind of laughed about it and she quickly turned the dial to the only other local rock station we had— which was right in the middle of the much more rarely played studio version of Beautiful Loser.
Got in my car to see the Who for the first time. Song on the radio was Amazing Journey from Tommy. Never heard that song on the radio since then , that was 1979.
Speaking of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine”…
I have a USB thumb drive in my car with about 1500 songs on it, and usually set to shuffle. One day I was driving home from work and it randomly played “Welcome to the Machine”, followed by Led Zeppelin’s “Hats Off To (Roy) Harper”.
Roy Harper is the guest vocalist on “Welcome to the Machine”.
One time I walked into a Walgreen’s, and Huey Lewis and the News’s “I Want a New Drug” was playing on the music system. Another time I was boarding a fishing boat while Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was playing on a radio on the boat. Fortunately that boat didn’t wreck.
Hearing James Taylor’s boring-as-fuck music makes me want to jump off a bridge.
Driving home from work just now, I got caught in one of the worst downpours I’ve ever experienced: the visibility was so bad that drivers were putting their hazards on and going 10 mph in a 55, and some people were bailing out completely and pulling into the shoulder to wait out the rain.
That’s when “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” came on. I was so surprised I laughed out loud!
Just out of high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life. The one thing I knew for sure is that I wanted to get away from everyone and everything I’d known up to that point, but there weren’t any opportunities to do that. With that thought far in the back of my mind, I was at a lady friend’s apartment, waiting while she changed to go out for a meal or something, and I sat down and watched a goldfish swimming around in a tiny bowl. Just as the metaphor started to hit me, I heard this on the radio:
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Time by Pink Floyd. Hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks, although I think this is the first time I’ve ever told that story.
Long after that, I’d just emerged from an on-again-off-again relationship. This woman would break up with me, I’d take it in stride and she’d call to reconcile the next week. By the third breakup in four or five months, I was really starting to like her. She never explained her behavior and it was the only relationship that I hadn’t decided to end, so I took it pretty hard. Getting on with my life, I was doing something mundane like shopping, and this came on the radio:
This love has taken its toll on me She said goodbye too many times before
This Love by Maroon 5. First time I’d heard it, despite all the airplay it was getting, and it stopped me in my tracks. I actually dropped whatever it was I was doing and looked for the source of the music, thinking it was some kind of awful joke. I didn’t raise a fist to the heavens and shout, “That’s not funny, dammit!” but I sure wanted to.
