Music I love records in my brain like a download to the hard disk. Always has. ("Is it me?")

Do you ever get a recording you've loved embedded in your mind? Where you can hear each note of the arrangement and singer running through your mind? And is that what you "sing along with" when you do that tune, until it becomes your own?

Do you ever sort of reset the mental karaoke to take a song you have absorbed and "run it" through some other performer's style to see how it would go? Like in "Amadeus?"

Do you run it through your own style?

And hey-- how aware are you of what others might call "your sound"?

We were discussing "our sound" in connection with our Saturday night service last night... and this karaoke of the mind is a definite factor for me in absorbing and then creating a lot of the music we do. I know for a fact that the soundtrack to Brother Where Art Thou, which we had been listening to that afternoon, affected how we did tunes we've done for years that are NOT in the soundtrack, but could have been.

So I'm curious how YOU experience this kind of thing.

My apologies for tainting our folk process with the K word. Didn't know how else to make a short, accurate thread title! So I thought we'd redeem the K word by using it OUR way.

~Susan