Happy Surprises

For me, one of life's great pleasures is when you go looking for something you like and end up finding something you like even more.

I think of this specifically in terms of music. Back in the pre-digital days of albums, if you liked a song, you had to take a chance on buying the whole album and hope the rest of it didn't suck. I remember distinctly seeing the video for Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" on MTV in the basement of my cousin Kathie's house in 1992. The song was so poppy and cool and the video was a mishmash of Japanese anime -- I was entranced. So the very next music shop I saw (remember those?), I found the album, plunked down my fifteen bucks, and proceeded to listen to it for the next twenty years.

Of course, "Girlfriend" will probably always be my favorite track but the real pleasure came in how many other tracks I came to love. "Evangeline," "Does She Talk," "Nothing Lasts," etc. It's one of the most consistently listenable albums I ever bought. I could just put it in my CD player (remember those?) and let it go without having to worry about skipping over the lame songs. Finding the song "Girlfriend" was great but finding the album Girlfriend was even better.

Anyway, part of what makes this discovery of something additional and equally awesome is its rarity. More often than not, an album will have one or two good songs, a couple of middling ones, and several that you just want to automatically skip every time. (There are still portions of U2's latest album that I haven't listened to all the way through.)

These days, you don't have to buy albums at all. You can do a Seal Team 6 search and destroy targeting and find the one exact song you want, not having to bother with the other dozen tracks if you don't want to. On the one hand, this is nice for a dilettante like me who only wants that three-and-a-half minutes and not the whole ninety minute musical experience most of the time. But it does cut down on the likelihood of making that pleasant discovery. Deep cut tracks (as the local DJ calls them) are more likely to stay buried this way.

Fortunately, the shotgun approach of Google and Youtube searches make up for this a bit and you may still stumble across something you've never heard but can never live without now that you have. Having said that, let me just say to the Pretenders' song "Night In My Veins," my dear, where have you been all my life? You're not what I was looking for but am I glad I found you.