Hard Wired

Walking to the bus stop the other day I found myself whistling/singing David Crosby/Graham Nash’s Wind on the Water. Penned many years ago the song decries humankind’s hunting of whales to the brink of extinction. Why this song over twenty years old is stuck in my head I really can’t say. Couplets about whale meat being used for ephemera such as lipstick and the like really shouldn’t be the default song in my personal RAM. Animal rights activism has not been a hall mark of my life, take kibbee for example.

There are other songs in the rapidly accessed storage portion of my brain. Most of them however are Merle Haggard songs. There is Momma Tried, God’s Own Singer and Sing me Back Home and they crop up all the time. Wind on the Water has an incredible hook. Still there should be for any number of reasons a hundred other songs that should be hard wired into my head.

I mean I get to some extent the why of the Haggard songs being stuck in my head. There are trains, mama, a misspent life and remorse at death woven into each one. About sums up the rural American experience that I wanted to believe was to be my life when I was fourteen or fifteen. Life did not head that way for me. My life is not rural and I am not in jail, mom is dead but my life has not been totally wasted. Still I get the mythology that keeps those songs inside me. What I don’t get is why Wind on the Water is there.

Maybe it was some lass that had it on a LP when I was in those psyche molding years of undergraduate studies and my infatuation with her wove the words and music into my mind. Maybe it is the real lure the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean holds for me that keeps it close. Sunset behind and the moon rising the water is always my image of my chosen home.

I assume other people have hard wired musical memories. I wonder what they are. Here’s another one….