Hold Me Like a Baby That Will Not Fall Asleep
I have much to report on the bacchanalia of roller coasters, fried foods, and family (dys)function that is our annual extended family reunion to an amusement park on the shores of Lake Erie, but, I don't have time to do it justice and hilarity right this minute. Hopefully later this evening I can write a good post.
In the meantime, do you ever get a phrase from a song stuck in your head? Like, STUCK STUCK STUCK in your head and it WILL NOT GO AWAY for anything? And you listen obsessively to other songs OVER AND OVER AND OVER again in an attempt to get that ONE MEDDLESOME AND UNPLACEABLE PHRASE out of your head because you fear if you don't it will keep playing over and over until you go stark raving mad?
No? Really? It's just me, then?
I guess I am nuts.
I've been listening to the music from the movie Music and Lyrics, an album by the Perishers, and also a song by some dude named Daughtry who is evidently famous for having been on a show that I have never watched* but is, by all reports, quite a big hit - trying to shake this musical obsession.
But, none of this got the pesky musical phrase out of my head. So I googled it. (LAWMOMMY PULLS HAIR, POUNDS HER HEAD AGAINST HER DESK AND WAILS, "WHY DIDN'T THIS OCCUR TO ME BEFORE???????????")
The phrase is (as you might have guessed from the title of this post), "Hold me like a baby that will not fall asleep." I have no idea where this came from, or where I heard it, but, I know it stuck with me, because, while it might seem like a romantic idea to someone who has NEVER held a baby that will not fall asleep - to someone who has spent a LOT of time holding a baby that wouldn't fall asleep (that would be Gabriel) - even years later, the feeling of desperation that accompanies that act does not leave me. "Hold me like a baby that will not fall asleep" - it's an act of desperation, of angst and anxiety and fretfulness - is it not? It doesn't sound like a love song, not to me, anyway. I think it captured my dark curiosity. Why would anyone ask for this particular kind of holding?
And so it played, over and over and over again, in my head, just that single phrase.
But, thank god for google. And youtube.com. Because I was able to determine WHICH song it belongs to, WHO sang it, and then LISTEN to it. About 12 times this morning. And that seems to have done the trick to get it out of permaplay in my own little music-room-of-obsession in the deep dark recesses of my brain.
It's Suzanne Vega's Gypsy, from her 1987 CD Solitude Standing, and the music can be found at this youtube link. (I have NO IDEA what the animation that accompanies the music is about. NONE WHATSOEVER. I have no association with You Tube, Suzanne Vega or the person who put this video together and am in no way shape or form endorsing same. Just saying, this is the song that was making me crazy.) It's actually a really great song. But, I'm still not sure what the refrain is supposed to MEAN.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YBH_o1_tqIk
LM
* I'm serious. I don't watch it. I had no idea who Daughtry was, until I heard the song on the radio (the song is "Home" and I was all, "that is an AWESOME song. WHO is this guy, singing this song with these great pipes??" ( er...vocal chords). And, then, I found out he came from American Idol. Am I the only thirty-something in America who didn't know this? Please tell me I am not alone.)
posted by LawMommy at 10:06 AM
6 Comments:
You're not alone! Glad you got the song out of your head.
I think I watched about 10 minutes of Idol this year and that was because my daughter wanted to watch it. So yeah, Daughtry kind of came out of nowhere for me too. :-)
haha - he wasn't on Idol this year people! Get with it! Geez! Haha.
I get songs stuck in my head, you aren't crazy. I read somewhere a few years ago that the cure is to listen to the song all the way through which I guess is exactly what you figured out :-) Something about our brain's inability to complete the task that makes it stuck (like a record).
You are not alone! I'm not an Idol watcher either...now America's Next Top Model, cat fights over ridiculous shallow absurdities, yeah! I'm all over that one!
I know who Daughtry is, but I've never heard any of his songs since Idol (and, no, I don't watch much of it). I'm with you about that song lyric. What the heck does that mean?!? I too had one that would. not. go. to. sleep. Literally, two 20 minute naps a day and up 4-6 times a night until she was two years old. And for the first year of that, she was screaming almost non-stop. I held her, and held her, and held her and cried, and cried, and cried. Holding a baby that will not sleep is not romantic. It's not sentimental. It's not dreamy. It's torture (at least mine was). I couldn't even finish listening to the song on You Tube.
Now you have that line stuck in my head.
But I can understand what it might mean. While holding a sleepless baby is torture for the parent, the song is looking at it from the point of view of the baby. Imagine that, when you can't sleep, when all you can do is cry wordlessly, there's someone you can count on to keep holding you and keep trying to comfort you.
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