and now here to sing this lovely ballad -

 

Like a lot of people, I get into song funks.

I wake up every morning, turn on my computer, and play one song for weeks. Anyone who's ever lived with me can attest to this irritating regularity. 


My earworm is no snob. I went through a particularly troubling period where I played the 90s clunker 'Faded' by Soul Decision for a month, propelling it to the top of my Most Played (this a song most notable for its astonishing rap interlude, which includes the phrase 'the way we conversated' and ends, 'How's it goin'? Ha! - I'm faded'). 


It's basically unknowable how my brain decides what it will have, but what it wants, it craves. 


For some months now, though its frequency's decreased, the song of the moment is the Mamas and the Papas' 'Dream a Little Dream of Me.' It should probably disturb me that nothing's come to take its place, as this seems some arcane psychological judgment my taste is making on my mental state, but nothing rights my nerves like Mama Cass singing her lovely ballad. 


The lyrics are this side of saccharine, the title refrain smacking of the doo-wop ditty it could have been, its penny melody origins. It has the crucial three minute length, chemically proven to be the only amount of time a pop song should occupy. But despite its pleasantly familiar structure and catchy chorus, its requisite oo-ah backup and da-dum da-dum rhythm, it reads more like elegy than harmonic snack. 


It's not just Mama Cass that makes this happen, though her voice, richly mournful, thrummingly sweeping, imbues each word with pointed feeling. She pulls out vowels like warm taffy, the voice diminishing finally into pure da rum dum hum singalong that itself fades out into whistle and silence. 


The song is very baldly about the famous kind of romantic nostalgia - the lover missing the beloved - that informs some huge percentage of all art, but this rendition frames this old tragedy in the terms of sweet 60s pop. It seems to say: maybe there's something nice about feeling sad, when you have something nice to feel sad about.