The Quest to Remember A Song
Yesterday afternoon I recalled a song that I heard a week or two prior; it’s a song I heard before, and hadn’t heard it in a long time. I remember that I really enjoyed the song, but since hearing it, yesterday was the first time I thought of it since. And a tiny bit of it was stuck in my head, but unfortunately, not enough of it for me to remember the name of the track.
To the best of my recollection, it was a song by Coldplay, and that’s all I had to go on. I couldn’t think of any lyrics with which I could plug into Google. I couldn’t hum the melody to anyone, because all I could remember was that it had some fun guitar work in it, and it was not as similar to other popular Coldplay songs like Clocks, Viva La Vida, Yellow, or Fix You.
So that’s all I had to work with; beyond that, all I knew was that I heard it on an Alternative music station. Even that wasn’t very helpful because I couldn’t remember if it was a local radio station or a satellite radio station. OK. Where to from there?
My very first step was to pore through the list of Coldplay song titles on Spotify. I know, it’s a bit weird to go down this road since I couldn’t remember the song title. But the way my memory works is a bit funny – usually when I can’t remember something, I can still find it when looking through other familiar things. Suddenly the wires in my brain connect and I say “Aha! That’s what I was looking for!” It works sometimes, but not this time. Not a single track in Spotify’s discography stood out to me apart from the popular tracks that almost everyone has heard a billion times.
I had to proceed to the next step, which was to listen to the Coldplay discography and listen for songs I recognized. This wasn’t so bad – I got to listen to some good music; I like Coldplay just fine, thank you. But I was getting impatient, because the first round of listening wasn’t really giving me any results. Not only was I not hearing anything familiar, the name of the track wasn’t rushing to my head either.
I thought to speed up the process I might look up some playlists of stations I listen to frequently to see if the song appeared on any of them. I couldn’t find anything familiar, but as I was doing so, and near to the end of listening to the second Coldplay album on my list, a strange thing happened. A hazy picture of a song title sort of appeared in my mind. I could almost see it! But it still wasn’t clear. So I looked at the next album on the list to see if I could find a track title that seemed familiar enough to be what I was looking for.
Lo and behold, I found it! The track: Adventure of a Lifetime. This was exactly the song I was looking for. I have no idea why I couldn’t remember the name or why I forgot it in the first place, but I found it. It took me a few hours at the start of the day, but I was glad to have success.
And now I hope that never happens to me again (although I know it will).
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