What Is Your Favorite Song?

The Impossible Question.

What’s Your Favorite Song…

Should you ever ask someone what their favorite song is, it’s not unlikely they’ll receive the audacity of your inquiry with a look of panic and terror as If your question poses some sort of threat. To ask anyone to choose from a lifetime of meaningful songs that occupy sacred emotional territory is a big ask indeed. To choose one feels wrong, like you’re betraying your best friend. That’s the kind of answer we earn on our deathbed, once every melody that ever wrecked us or saved us has had its turn. It’s an impossible question. It’s an impossible answer.

Me? I can answer that as I have for a few decades.

I have a song, the one song. The song that made me want to write this. This is neither compelling nor thought provoking, urgent or particularly interesting. No one even asked. But the song played for me today and it played from an unexpected source, a car next to me at a stoplight on Sunset. It’s like the universe wanted to get me out of my head, a place I’ve been locked in lately. It caught me by surprise. It was like running in to your crush but not being dressed for the occasion. If it were to play 99 more times on repeat, it still wouldn’t be enough.

I heard this song for the first time when I was a young kid, too young to need to know the meaning, too young to recognize what meaning even was. The depth of a song had no lyrical bearing on me. I was a kid. That’s how I know now that certain songs are meant to find me. They make me feel like I have super powers. That’s why they all become so sacred to me. Some songs belong to you and only you. This one belongs to me. Just like some people you meet along the way, although strangers by definition, they become immediate kindred spirits in an instant. It’s the same inexplicable connection that makes lovers feel like soul mates. When that song finds you it’s the same feeling as when you go some place you’ve never been before and arcanely it feels familiar, it feels safe, it feels as though it had been expecting you. I believe that some songs are part of our destiny. They tell us something about ourselves. Fate sends you music that feels like it’s part of your DNA. These songs give you flight. These songs fight your wars. The songs are you if you were written on a piano or a guitar. We are composed by the songs we love.

This song is everything to me. If ever you want to see me strip away all the things I carry that bury me with burdens or If ever you want to see what a sudden burst of uncontrollable happiness looks like, you play me this song. Whenever I want to get back to myself, I play this song. It has never changed. After all the songs that I have fallen in love with, the songs that I can’t live without, this is still the one.

So go ahead! Ask me. Ask me what my favorite song is and eagerly, I will always give you the same answer I’ve been giving for most of my life and that will forever be, “Just Like Heaven,” by The Cure.

*Written to…need I even have to say.