When did you first hear your favorite song?

[take5_d_shorterer]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opin ... songs.html

[joklend]

I'm not sure if I have one, and if I did it would be different from my favourite songs during childhood and adolescence.

[Quaco]

Fifteen, I think.

[mentalist (slight return)]

Strawberry Fields Forever, probably 12 or something. But I first 'heard' it (man) care of LSD in my mid 20s.

[Hightea]

Summer of 74 - 10 years old. It could be several from that summer.

[trans-chigley express]

I can’t really pick one song as my favourite but as so many of my favourites are Beatles ones then 3-5 for sure.

[Brickyard Jack]

In 1987, was about 21, in my final year of university in Liverpool, living in a really nice flat on the top floor of a big old house off Lodge Lane. The floor below was occupied by three very attractive young women. Every now and then I would hear the three of them singing along to a song. I would stand outside their door for a moment or two, glorying in the belting vocal that is...
Superman, by Barbra Streisand. I can still hear them now.

[Carl's Son]

My current favourite is A Love For You by Paul McCartney which I heard for the first time last year...

[BARON CORNY DOG]

I don't know. But this works for me, and comes from my Desert Island Disc post (I'm talking about being very young and riding in the backseat of my parents car, lying down on the black leather back seat at night):

Fleetwood Mac “Over My Head”


I would watch the shadows flicker through the car, sometimes moving slow and sometimes whipping through. Sometimes there were different shadows crossing each other at different rhythms. They captivated me. It was the late 70s and Fleetwood Mac ruled the radio. When I heard “Over My Head” twenty years later, I flashed back to lying on the back seat and watching the shadows go through the car in time with the music. I never forgot the visual memory or how it felt with the music, but I had long lost the song. It’s still my favorite Fleetwood Mac tune, and is redolent of that time. That was a great time to be a little kid. I never tire of this one -- the fade in, the gently churning electric piano, the constant, quietly insistent drums, McVie’s voice, the organ. And nowadays, I listen to the guitar too, but I doubt I paid attention to it thirty years ago.

[Rayge]

I was 18 when I'll Never Need More than This was released, but that was effectively the peak development of one of the strands of my taste, set when I was 14 with the purchase of He's a Rebel.
This is not a new idea to me: ever since reading the appendices to Illuminatus! I've gone with the idea that our adult tastes in most things are set around puberty – which in my case was around 14

[take5_d_shorterer]

The Language of Light, 1952
by Clarence John Laughlin

Many of Clarence John Laughlin’s Photographs actually show ghosts: transparent but nonetheless corporeal ladies draped in sheets or period nightgowns, appearing from behind stone monuments or Ionic columns or other decaying relics of the Old South. In other of Laughlin’s pictures, like the one shown here, the ghosts have fled, and only the pattern of their spell remains.

Any child abed in lazy and luxurious convalescence from measles or chicken pox, half-drunk with tea and hot lemonade, learns that the space between the window shade and the casement is a magic place, populated by spirits that cast their shifting, liquid shadows on the screen and tap out their secret messages on the window frame. Once each of us was open to such dramas of the senses, revealed in terms that were trivial and ephemeral: the reflection of the hand mirror on the dressing table, slowly tracing its elliptical course across the ceiling.

Many of us forget the existence of such experiences when we learn to measure the priorities of practical life; some of us remember their existence but find that in the light of day they have become as shy and evasive as the hermit thrush; a few, whom we call artists, maintain an easy intimacy with the wonders of simple perception. In this century many of these have been photographers, and the exploration of our fundamental sensory experience has been in large part their work. It is photography that has continued to teach us of the pleasure and the adventure of disinterested seeing.

— John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs, 1973

[the masked man]

Love Will Tear Us Apart I heard at 14. I was probably too young to understand it fully, but it left a mark. Later I filled in the gaps.

[The Modernist]

Some of you should write about your favourite songs in the BCB 100 songs thread...we need more contributors to that.

I've written about my favourite record 'I am the Black Gold of the Sun'. I guess I was in my late thirties when I first heard it (at least The Rotary Connection original I love, I hear the 4Hero/Nuyuricon version when it came out). I'm a bit unusual in I tend to look for new things, I'm much less attached to stuff I grew up with.