The reunification of the persistence of memory

Have you ever had a memory that hits you out of nowhere? Just comes at you, and you have no idea what sparked it, but there it is, and sometimes, it's not even distinct enough to count as a memory?

Earlier this week, while driving late at night, I think*, I suddenly remembered this other time when I was driving, probably also late at night, and this one song came on the radio. I remembered the vocal hook of the chorus, and the soft sadness of the music, and the beautiful sound of the female singer's voice, and the DJ saying something over the intro about how the song was the closest aural equivalent to sex, or something like that. I had no idea when I had heard it, either back in McHenry, or down at U of I, or driving between the two, but it had been years ago. I had no idea who the artist was, either; I didn't know if if had been said on the radio or not. I couldn't even remember any of the lyrics. All I remembered was the feel of the song, and thinking, at the time, that it was fucking awesome, though not the aural equivalent to sex or anything like that. It really seemed more sad and wistful.

The point being, I had absolutely no clue to who did this song, absolutely no information to go on to find it. And that hook was just stuck in my head. I needed to know, and had no idea how to find out. I knew, I was fucked. It's not like I could go up to anyone and say "hey, you know that song that goes...." I didn't know how the song even really went! What if I was misremembering the bar?

So, over several days, I hummed that bar to myself, in my head, trying to think of any lyrics that could go to it that felt right. It would go away, and then come back again. Eventually the one word I kept coming back on was "strange." So I tried searching Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google with some combination of the words strange, lyrics, female, singer, sexy, 90's, alternative (I thought I might have heard it on Q101, based on the DJ's voice and comment). I got nothing. I watched the video to that Sneaker Pimps song. Kind of the same era, thought definitely not the song. I kicked around Q101's website, to see if there was some database of songs there I could search. I gave up. The hook stayed hooked in my head. It stayed there all week, popping up and taunting me. I didn't know what it was, and there was no way to find out.

Anyways, earlier today, I tried searching for it again, trying to set words to the music. I tried concentrating on the fact that the song was supposed to be sexy, so I tried thinking of phrase implying longing or lust or something like that. Two bodies connecting. I thought up the phrase "drift into you." I searched for it. I got a song that definitely wasn't it. I tried just searching with "drift" plus combinations of all the other words. I got a fucking Uncle Cracker song. Q101 again. Nothing.

Reformatting, I focused the phrase "into you." I think I decided to do this because the phrase sounded familiar, like it related to the concept of the song better than the word "drift". I might have had the first word wrong. Also, I seemed like the phrase into you had been on the tip of my tongue, or at least my mind, the first time I was searching, but since the phrase "strange into you" makes no sense, I dismissed it and forgot about it.

I typed "into you" (no quotation marks) into Youtube, and fourth down was "Mazzy Star - 'Fade Into You'". Mazzy Star? It didn't sound familiar, but somehow it felt right. I could definitely see how "fade" could work for "drift," in fact work better. I clicked on it:



I knew within seconds that this was what I was looking for. I laughed in a mixture of relief, and disbelief. Isn't the Internet amazing?

...Also, as it was playing I looked up the lyrics on some lyric site. The lyrics to the chorus go

Fade into you
Strange that you never knew

I actually had it right, both ways! Somehow, the memory remained, it was there, buried deep in my brain, and I just had to unearth it. It took a week, but somehow it came up, and I could put it back together. It's all in there, somehow. Strange.

*It might have actually been while reading this.