Today’s category is…
A Song That Reminds You of a Certain Event.
The staff picks are:
Tara Seetharam: “I Will…But” – SHeDaisy
My freshmen girls choir performed this song at our high school spring show ten years ago. The photos of me in a tacky red bandana halter top are painful, but the memories of my first taste of high school choir are precious.
Kevin Coyne: “I Wanna Be Sedated” – The Ramones
Our high school tradition was to rewrite a famous song to fit the occasion. Nineties Manhattan hipsters that we were, we went eighties and the graduation song was “We’re Almost Graduated”, to the tune of the Ramones classic.
Our mascot was Karate Squid. We thought we were cool.
Leeann Ward: “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” – Alan Jackson
This is an obvious choice, but I can’t think of another song that has captured how I felt regarding an event better than this one does, right down to the “I Love Lucy reruns.”
Dan Milliken: “Your Cheatin’ Heart” – Hank Williams
Because it’s one of the only songs I can reliably conjure up out of the blue of my memory, it’s been a campfire singalong staple at all two of the camping trips I’ve taken in my adult life. Camping trips are the best.
Lol. I have to go with Mariah Carey’s “Hero” Our Class sang it at our 5th grade graduation.
I’ll go with Leeann’s pick “Where Were You” since I was at my desk at 6 WTC when the first plane hit tower 1 and I saw some of the debris falling outside my window. Fortunately, all of my co-workers got out safely.
Ha. I wondered what Dan’s explanation for “Your Cheatin’ Heart” would be.
My pick is Garth Brooks “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old).” In one of the more extroverted events of my life, I had to sing the song at my grandfather’s 75th birthday party in 1997. I had the cowboy hat, guitar, and everything.
It was a lot of fun and I remember having the DJ playing the song to sing along with. Not a day goes by when I hear the song, where I don’t think of this event along with it. I was all but just shy of ten years old at the time of my grandfather’s party.
All great picks. Yay for “I Love Lucy” reruns!
One that I might throw out is Alan Jackson’s “Good Time” (not one of his best, but it has a certain charm about it), which was played at my graduation party last summer, during which I got a few of my party guests to join me in doing the line dance that they did in the music video. Fun times!
“Learning to Live Again” by Garth Brooks; I had just found out my then husband had a five year old just four days short of our 8th wedding anniversary, and a month after having a tumour removed that made me unable to conceive.
“God Bless The USA” always takes me back to my third grade concert back in 2001.
Brad Paisley’s “Welcome to the Future”. Although I’m not American and live in Australia, I remember the day when President Obama won the 2008 election. I was with my mates and we were in the school library, supposed to be doing research for our final assignments, but instead all of us (including the teachers) gathered around the computers to watch the tallies being counted. Although we could hardly fathom the true significance of the moment, we all knew that history, one way or the other, was being made and that the times were changing.
“Where Have All Our Heroes Gone” by Bill Anderson. There were many good things that came out of the 1960s but the breakdown of public civility was not one of them, a trend that continues to this day tthrough the misuse of the online media
The Glee Cast’s “To Sir With Love”
It reminds me of the last summer my friends and I spent together while I was still a High School kid, and reminds me of how bittersweet it was leaving each other and our hometown, though I still get to see two of them regularly in college. We often did sing (and sign, as we are Deaf) along to this in the car.
Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning is the only possible choice for me.
This goes probably well out of bounds here–but on the evening of September 11, 2001, I wept when I heard Samuel Barber’s “Adagio For Strings” on the radio, as performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein. This piece is America’s unofficial musical work for mourning, and 9/11 was just such a day.
Where Were you When the World Stopped Turning, but also Tim mcGraw’s “Fly Away” reminds me of a funny event from 8th grade. I joined the SADD club. at the end of the school year, we had our banquet and we ended the evening by getting on stage at the school and singing “We Are The World” (my 8th grade year was 1987-88) and as you know the song fades out in choruses. Well no one told us how many choruses to sing! we had people stopping, restarting (me) and basically completely confused LOL. Tim’s song ends of course with Faith (?) telling the girls to “keep going” when they were trying to stop singing.
Rascal Flatts’ “I’m Movin’ On”, sang by the chorus at my high school graduation. Always takes me back to that last day of high school.
Jamey Johnson’s “In Color”. It was 2008. Some dude with a large beard had just released a new song that I thought was pretty good. I bought it on iTunes the week of CMA Music Festival, which is where I was. One night at the concerts, this bearded fellow, whom I now recognized as Jamey Johnson, walked out on stage with nothing but an acoustic guitar. He proceeded to captivate anyone whose heart was beating in that stadium by playing just one song, then walking backstage to let the next overblown wannabe rock star walk out, but that entire trip to me is still defined by “In Color”.