Sean writes:
I don’t know if I’m the only one like this, but there are a select few days in every calendar year when I have to listen to a particular song or songs. Today, the fourteenth of February, I require myself to listen to both “Valentine’s Day” by Springsteen and “Feb. 14″ by the Drive-By Truckers. On April 4, I listen to “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, preferably early in the morning. Three months after that, on the Fourth of July, I listen to Nirvana’s “Lake of Fire”, and this year, Neil Young’s “Powderfinger”, since I will have just turned 22. The cycle repeats itself yearly with U2′s “New Year’s Day.”
Steve replies:
Funny you should ask: Every year on my birthday I think of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” and its lyric “Do you remember/The 21st night of September?” I was born the next night, on the 22nd, and always resented Maurice White’s obstinate refusal to modify the lyric when performing live in concerts attended by me.
Beyond that, I only celebrate two anniversaries with my iPod. Every December 32, I listen to the Babyshambles song “32nd of December”. Eight months later — every seven years — I listen to Funkadelic’s “Friday Night, August 14″.
I should also say — to appease our resident music Trekkie, Michael Atchison, who is at the moment breathing into a brown lunch sack — that Bono of course got it all wrong when he wrote that lyric about early morning April 4. Martin Luther King was murdered in the early evening, at 6:01 P.M. And as great as Nirvana’s version of “Lake of Fire” was on “Unplugged,” it is still a Meat Puppets song. (And I believe the Meat Puppets even played on “Unplugged.”) There. I’m officially the guy who works in the record shop in “High Fidelity.”
Lastly, Sean, I hope your 22nd birthday doesn’t resemble anything else from “Powderfinger.” I’m not sure what’s going on in that song, but it doesn’t sound good.