Some of my favourite music is from a band that doesn't exist anymore, and one of my all-time favourite songs by them is "Two Lives at the End of the Night", the 11th and last track of their excellent 2010 album "Somewhere on the Golden Coast".
Except this isn't it. Don't play the song above, it's not the song I'm talking about. As any broke middle/high-schooler would at the turn of last decade, I pirated the ablum from a site lost to history to load it up to iTunes. I edited its metadata carefully and manually added the album art and Lyrics for some of the songs. I added only the songs I liked, to save disk space. One of these songs was what the zip wrongly so called "Two Lives at the End of the Night".
This is pretty annoying for all sorts of reasons; from the practical inconvenience of not knowing how to find it for streaming, or search for its lyrics, or even refer to it, to the cognitive displeasure of knowing the name by which I know this song is wrong, and that if I were to ever lose this file I wouldn't be able to listen to this tune again.
It's also nice though. It's an excellent song in its own merit, but this detail also sets it apart. All music takes you back to a moment you shared with that song, but this quirk of this particular tune makes my relationship to the song further stuck in time for me, in a past where the file in your computer was the song. It's also a window even further back, to a circumstance I imagine was more common before the internet— like a burned disk you found without a lable, or cazette that only says the artist's name. In an era where on a whim I can conjure up any song on my phone, listen for 5 seconds, lose interest and conjure the 50th of the day, this song comes to my mind longingly because I can't just play it [1]. It's purposeful.
Somewhere on the Golden Coast as of writing this blog post criminally only has 37,220 streams on its most popular song on Spotify— it's an album that's been largely forgotten by many I'm sure. But it's special for me.
If you know anything about the song I'm talking about, don't tell me. I like it this way.
[1]: I don't have enough space on my phone to hold my iTunes library.