Day Three hundred and fifty five - Rubber ring

With ten days left to go, it's time to look ahead, and not necessarily at what's going to be - the future is still very much terra incognita for me - but at might have been. And I say might because I'm fairly certain I won't have time, inclination and patience to actually go ahead with it, even if I stuck to a weekly basis. I would need the whole trifecta of those ingredients - time, inclination and patience - to actually go ahead, and the absence of any of those would mean the idea would be doomed from the start. I wrote not too long ago about how in the very late 90's, early 00's, I became a huge Nick Hornby fan, the height of that fandom being when I lifted his idea for '31 Songs', his book about songs that have a deep connection to him, and used it for a string of posts I wrote in one of my old blogs. And I wanted to revisit that idea, not on a blog, but rather on a podcast I was envisioning that would have weekly rotating themes. There would have been a segment where me and my friend S. would give each other a record the other never listened to before, and then we'd both discuss it, see what we've liked and what we didn't like about it. That would have been called 'Trading tapes'. Then there would be another segment, also music related, called 'The songs that saved your life.'

It's no secret that every single title from this year's posts are song titles - and yes, as I've been compiling the playlists for each month I've been finding out that here and there I've repeated some titles, and there was a need to do some adjustments and corrections in that regard. There are a number of bands which have contributed heavily to the titles list. Out of the blue, I'll say Placebo, Covenant, VNV Nation, Depeche Mode, but also - and perhaps most importantly of all - Morrissey and The Smiths. I've been a huge fan of both for decades now, and it's to them I turn to very often when I'm in need of inspiration, introspection, or even motivation. But it's also a testament to how we change when songs that were once just something that you ignored because they didn't say much to you, until that one day when you listen to them and they just gain a whole new life. One of those songs was 'Rubber Ring' for a long time, I'd listen to it, I'd not mind it, but it never stuck. It wasn't until fairly recently - and I'd say like about a decade ago - when one day I found myself listening to it more intently, and one line from it really stuck with me : 'But don't forget the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life.'

That there line sent into me a question, a question of whether or not I'd ever listened to a song that could be rightly considered life-saving for me. Music, as a whole, yes, it's saved my life and my sanity multiple times over, but specific songs? I don't know. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that - not very often - there would be a song for me that would be so potent, and that would come at just the right time in my life, that I could consider it had saved my life. But how many were there? Probably not very many. Do I change then how I define 'saving my life'? Because not every song that saved me was one that kept me from jumping into the abyss. No, some songs helped me not reach it at all. Some songs showed me there was wisdom in taking the other road, the one that leads away from the chasm. But lists, man, lists are hard. I said before that so many of the songs I chose for my '31 Song' thing I did on that blog - songs I then considered to be my all-time favourites - would not feature at all in such a list, were I to make it today. So how would I decide which would ones would make this list? I don't know, I really don't. It's far too titanic a thing for me to consider right now. I could maybe come up with some three or four songs, hell, if I'm honest some more - but those would be songs I've already written about, and I don't really want to tell those stories again. My hope is that from now on, I can fill my day with new songs, songs of then and songs of now, and maybe, just maybe, I'll find some more that will save my life.

[This is the playlist for October.]