The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #132652   Message #3863618
Posted By: keberoxu
30-Jun-17 - 02:56 PM
Thread Name: Where the heck is our blues people
Subject: RE: Where the heck is our blues people
I justify refreshing this thread because Mudcat Max name-checks the Black Keys here, and when I used the Mudcat search engine, there were not many mentions of the Black Keys as a best-selling award-winning US music group.

Anybody who dislikes reading personal confessions
about "what happened to me last night"
can tune out here and now.

The car radio was on last night while I drove home, after dark, down a state route with little traffic. And what I had was an experience that startled me emotionally, as musical experiences will do.

This was a tune I could not identify. It turns out to be "Tighten Up," written and recorded in 2010 by the Black Keys; today, after waking up, one of the first things I did was search for what I heard, using one recalled verse from the lyrics, online. That verse got the correct search results in seconds.   

Why was I so driven and anxious to identify the song on the radio?

The sound of this recording reminded me so forcefully of the popular blues-rock hybrid record singles from the 1960's, when I was, literally, a young and post-traumatic child. It was like waking up a part of me that has been out of action for a long time. The sound of music on the radio, if it appealed to me, used to be something on which I would focus my undivided attention. If you had seen me there and then, you would have seen me silently holding still and concentrating on the sound from the radio, trying to make a memory that I could recall, in order to play the music back silently in my mind at a later time. It was something to hold on to for a sense of security and stability.

Well, it isn't the first time I have been reminded of my childhood by something composed and broadcast recently, and it won't be the last.