There are, apparently, songs hiding in my brain

I could have gone the rest of my life without remembering that The Audition was even a band. That was the likely scenario.

I could have gone the rest of my life without remembering that The Audition was even a band. That was the likely scenario.

About two weeks ago we finished recording an extra month’s worth of shows. One of us had a couple of work trips coming up. During the recording process, it was brought to my attention that I once expressed love for a Relient K song called “The Best Thing.”

I didn’t remember the name of the song, or the song itself. I didn’t remember expressing love for it, or the day that caused me to express this admiration. I know the person I was with the day the claim was made, and I remember the band, but this particular memory, and the soundtrack to that memory, as far as I could tell, were gone.

Except they weren’t.

After recording, I looked up the song and listened to it. And then I listened again. And again.

“This is the best thing, the best thing that could be happening, and I think you would agree that the best thing is it’s happening to you and me,” Matt Thiessen sings.

It threw me through a loop for several days. I couldn’t stop listening to it. I had to know. I had to remember why I was so intimately familiar with this song, and why it was so important at the time. We’ve all had songs that we play on repeat for hours and hours until we get numb to its individual components.

But it was humbling to realize that I’ve felt this way dozens of times in my life, and it would be impossible to remember each individual ravenous repeat session.

This happened again recently when someone tweeted the show. It was a setlist from a Jack’s Mannequin show. It was in Columbus in something like 2009 and The Audition opened. After eyeing the setlist, I noticed the band’s name. So I looked up The Audition, and I stumbled onto “Don’t Be So Hard” which was featured on a Punk Goes Acoustic collection.

Deja-vu isn’t exactly what this is, but I’m back inside of another round of it.

I am trying to clear my head and repetitiously listen to “Don’t Be So Hard” until the time and place present itself, but I have a sinking feeling it won’t. This time I don’t have context. The first time, a friend was able to provide the “how” and the “why” — and that helped a little, but this time I don’t know if I’ll get so lucky.

I mean it was gone. I could have gone the rest of my life without remembering that The Audition was even a band. That was the likely scenario.

But now it’s back, and I have no recollection of why this song was so important to me, I just know that it was, or is. I don’t remember what Mix CD or playlist it was on, but it was there.

I would, were this the movie “High Fidelity” be unable to complete my own personal autobiographical record reorganization. And that’s troubling somehow.

This week, we’re putting out the All Time Low “Dear Maria” episode. I wanted to write a joke post about the video not passing the Bechdel Test. It doesn’t, obviously. It’s about a stripper who has no lines of dialogue and there are as many chimpanzees in the video as there are human women.

But I can’t stop thinking about The Fucking Audition.

What other songs are hiding in my brain? A quick Google didn’t yield spectacular results on this phenomena, so I’m going to float it out into the universe. Has this happened to you? What song? Why? What part don’t you remember? What’s your best guess? Why do you think this happened? Does this scare you? Should it scare me?

TL;DR Has The Audition caused any of you to lose sleep recently? No? Alright then. me either. Nevermind.