The soundtrack to my life

I have recently started to listening to music a lot more and I'm really enjoying
It. I have a new app on my phone called 8 track and it gives me a selection of playlists depending on what sort of music I have said  I'm in the mood to hear. So I'm discovering new songs and remembering old favourites.

It has got me thinking about how evocative music is and how one song can bring back so many memories.
A few years back, in my final year in college we had some Belgian students come over as part of an exchange programme I was part of and we had the 
Responsibility of entertaining them for the week. One of the nights the college organised for us to bring them to hear some traditional Irish music and I remember we were all singing along to sonny ( you know the one ...sonny dont go away, I'm here all alone, your daddy is a sailor that never comes home ) if you're anything like me you'll be singing it in your head by now. And I remember the Belgians thought it must be a really popular song because we all knew the words. I can't speak for the others but m mum had a woman's heart cassette tape when we were kids and she played it all the time. It tends to sink in even when you don't want it to. Listening to it in more recent years I did find the mother in the song to be overly clingy. It's not right for a woman to be begging her adult son to stay home because she's lonely. Let the man have his own life 

Due to my parents varied tastes we listened to everything from van Morrison to pan pipes ( painful stuff ) 
My mother clearly had the superior taste in music while my dad swayed towards world music that bordered on embarrassing. I only need to hear a few bars of a gypsy kings song and I feel like I'm in the back of my dads car on the way to school. 

I remember vividly dancing around to pretty woman when I was about 9 or 10
In a special twirly skirt ( that was perfect for dancing ) while blissfully unaware that the song was actually about a prostitute.  

Or just as I was entering my teens my dad came home from a trip abroad with a bag of sweets and the latest now that's what I call music tape that had gems on it like jump around and to this day I still 
Think it sounds like horses neighing in the background of the song although it probably isn't. 

I will admit to having somewhat dubious musical taste and once when I was only 10 or so ( a very impressionable age) I developed a bit of a thing for a Latin American artist called  
Trini Lopez ( one of my dads tapes ), he had a hit song called if I had a hammer which I'm sure no one outside my family would recognize and I just thought he was great and I had the sort of asexual crush that only a kid of that age can have. I also shared similar feelings for Zorro and McGyver. I remember how much everyone laughed when I proclaimed that when I grew up and had 
Kids that's what I would name them. It was pretty funny then but considering some of the things people call their kids now I could probably get away with it.

For every song I've ever loved it brings me back to a certain point in my life. greenday 'when I come around' makes me feel 14 again and I'm pretty sure I still know all the words. 

The kinks make me remember lazy summer afternoons when I was 16 or 17 and hadn't yet entered the real world, I still took on the musical taste of those around me and that's how I found myself going retro. 

The coral 'dreaming of you' still makes me want to get up and dance on a table like we always used to do in captain cooks bar in Lausanne, the year I lived there.

Damien Dempsey has been soiled for me because of a guy I dated in my early twenties who was a bit of a plonker ( that's putting it mildly) and always insisted on singing along whenever I played his cd.

For every dark day there's a song that will lift you out of it or one That will drag you down into dark places. It all depends on where you want to go.
Pearl jam's 'black' used to be my song to wallow to. 

When you break up With someone all you can seem to hear is songs about love but when you're in that loved up phase the songs you're hearing are the same, it's just you that's different in how they make you feel.

so that's a small part of the soundtrack of my life. There are many more songs and many more moments. And part of me thinks I should have left out the more embarrassing musical confessions but where's the fun in that 

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