![\"45's](\"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/45s-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a>45’s – remember those?<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n T.S. Eliot once said that April is the cruelest month<\/strong>.\u00a0 Perhaps that is so, but this year it seems that January is vying for that ignominious honor.\u00a0 In addition to the cold winter storms hammering both coasts, and the plummeting stock market, we also seem to be losing icons<\/strong> of the entertainment industry at an alarming rate.\u00a0 Pat Harrington, Dan Haggerty, Alan Rickman, and Wayne Rogers to name but a few.\u00a0 Perhaps the greatest loss has been experienced in the music world – most notably Natalie Cole, Glenn Frey of the Eagles and David Bowie of, well, David Bowie.\u00a0\u00a0 For those of us of a certain age, it seems that with each death a bit of our youth gets taken away.\u00a0 I got to thinking about that the other day as I was listening to a tribute to Mr. Frey.\u00a0 The radio host played “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and I was instantly transported back to 1972,<\/strong> remembering exactly where I was living and the beat up\u00a0record player on which I played their LP.<\/p>\n I don’t know about you, but I can bookmark my younger days<\/strong> by the singers and songs of the era.\u00a0 In 1964, I was standing waiting for the school bus when everyone’s transistor radios began playing a song from a new group:\u00a0the Beatles, singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand”.\u00a0 Just to illustrate why I never became a record producer, I remember turning to my girlfriend and saying I thought the lyrics were stupid<\/strong>.\u00a0 So much for my ability to spot a trend. \u00a0But somehow\u00a0that first exposure to\u00a0the world’s most successful quartet is forever\u00a0etched in my memory.\u00a0 In the summer of 1966 I was at a party with a young man by the name of Greg Susser.\u00a0 When the\u00a045 of\u00a0Percy Faith’s “Theme from\u00a0A Summer Place”<\/strong>\u00a0dropped on to the turntable Greg and I went out to the dance floor.\u00a0 Mid-way through the song, under the starry skies, he leaned down and said to me, “For the rest of our lives, when we hear this song, we should remember this moment”. \u00a0Quite a romantic play for a 17-year-old with chin stubble.\u00a0 But the fact is, for the past 50 years, every time I’ve heard that song I do<\/em> think about that party.\u00a0\u00a0It would be a more sentimental story if I said that we went on to have a great romance but actually I\u00a0never saw him after high school.\u00a0 Still…the moment is cemented\u00a0firmly in my memory because of that song.\u00a0 \u00a0And in 1973, after a day skiing at Squaw Valley<\/strong>, I was in the bar dancing with a ski patrol member who was a new arrival from Germany.\u00a0 The song “It Never Rains in California” came on and he whispered to me – “Do you mean to tell me it never rains here?”.\u00a0 It seemed like such a ridiculous question, given that we were surrounded by several feet of snow.\u00a0 Every time I hear that song I think about him and wonder whether\u00a0he was smart enough\u00a0to figure out how to get back to Germany.<\/p>\n Legendary Glenn Frey<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n With the passing of Glenn Frey and David Bowie\u00a0<\/strong>every media outlet has played their songs in tribute.\u00a0 For the most part, I could place where I was when\u00a0their songs were hits and miraculously,\u00a0I could remember most of the lyrics.\u00a0 Yet, if you threatened me with my life, I could not tell you the name of the book\u00a0<\/strong>I read last month nor could I quote any passage from it.\u00a0 I gave this some serious thought – why can I recall\u00a0lyrics from 50 years ago but not remember anything I read last month?\u00a0 I did some quick research (meaning I Googled the phenomenon) and found several interesting articles addressing the issue.\u00a0 Clearly, I am not alone in my selective memory.\u00a0 It mostly comes down to this: repetition and rhyme<\/strong>.\u00a0 It turns out that our old piano teachers were right – the more we hear something the easier it is to memorize and ingrain that “muscle memory” into our brain.\u00a0 Part of the reason that we recall songs from our youth is that we played them over and over.\u00a0 Remember when your mom yelled “Turn off that darn record player, I can’t hear that song one more time!”?\u00a0 Well, turns out, we were actually imprinting the song in the deep recesses of our memory.<\/p>\n The second reason we remember is due to the rhyming nature of most songs (think “American Pie”).\u00a0<\/strong> Our brains anticipate<\/em> a rhyme, thus making it easier to remember the whole phrase.\u00a0 For example, in the song “Mary Had\u00a0a Little Lamb”\u00a0the first two lines are ‘Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow’, so your brain anticipates\u00a0not only a word that rhymes with ‘snow’ but one that can also\u00a0be joined to that sentence in roughly the same amount of syllables or ‘beats’. This greatly reduces the number of available words<\/strong> your brain has to consider and so helps you remember the whole lyric\u00a0more quickly.\u00a0 Since we are programmed to remember song and rhymes better than prose, we can hum our high school fight song well into our old age.<\/p>\n At least now I understand WHY\u00a0I remember\u00a0old lyrics.\u00a0 But I can’t recall the name of that nice appliance repairman<\/strong> that was here in October.\u00a0 Perhaps if he’d sung a song I would stand a better chance.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Suzanne Sparrow Watson T.S. Eliot once said that April is the cruelest month.\u00a0 Perhaps that is so, but this year it seems that January is vying for that ignominious honor.\u00a0 In addition to the cold winter storms hammering … read more![\"Summer](\"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/Summer-Place-150x150.jpg\")
\n<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/Glen-Frey-150x150.jpg\")
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