Have you ever had a song or a jingle or something from your youth that you couldn’t quite place? And you casually look for it occasionally without any success. I have such a song. It has no lyrics, and I could (at best) sort of hum the tune. Music identity apps were not any help. I was certain it was from an old MacAddict CD, or maybe something I found when visiting my dad at his apartment when I was 14.
Well, I found it today. I thought the title was something like Long road home or Long drive back. I wasn’t far off the mark. I don’t remember how recently I started poking around for it, but a few months ago I downloaded an old Nautilus CD image, thinking that I’d found it there. A couple of weeks ago I started looking at MacAddict CDs (all conveniently available at Archive.org)
I was listening to Spotify when Basket Case came up on the random song play. I decided I wanted to listen to Brain Stew instead and set out to play it. While I was looking through album trying to remember which one it was on, some neuron that hadn’t fired in decades was set off. Something about the Nimrod cover hit me. My mouth agape, I tried intently to connect the dots. I didn’t know why, but this album was reminding me of that song… Then I saw it: Last Ride In. That title kind of matched what I was looking for. I played it, and was shocked to hear exactly what I’d been looking for. It’s not hard figure out why it’d gotten lost in my memory. Green Day is mostly known as a pop-punk band. This slow, surf-guitar riff makes almost no sense alongside the rest of their catalog. But there it is: beautiful, smooth, lyric-less. Some reverb and a bit of marimba…
I’m confident that I had not heard this song in 20 years. If you’re unfamiliar with the song, here’s the music video, which I’d never seen until this moment.
There’s a special magic that comes from finding something lost like this. I kind of wish I could capture the feeling that comes when your brain connects dots. It’s delightful.