Your five

Ask someone for their five favorite movies and you can guess half the list before they open their mouth. Godfather. Shawshank. Star Wars. 

Ask for their five favorite songs and something else happens. A hundred people give you close to five hundred answers. No consensus list. There never has been one. 

Because those songs were never chosen. They happened to you. The five are coordinates. A car in 1987. A kitchen radio. A slow dance you can still feel in your hands. The song is where you were standing when it found you, and nobody else was standing there. 

That's the strange deal at the heart of music. The thing that matters most to you is the thing you can least explain. Play your number one for a friend and watch their polite face. They're hearing a song. You're hearing a door. 

Underneath, every song is the same device. A time machine. They just come in sizes. 

The arena model seats eighteen thousand. Hockey people know the sound. A building full of strangers who agree on nothing, then that riff hits, the ay-ay-ay goes up, and for ninety seconds the whole place is one animal, fifteen years old again. Crazy Train is older than everyone on the ice. Nobody decided it would run the machine. It just does. 

The kitchen model seats eight. The Big Chill … a houseful of old friends, dishes to clear, Ain't Too Proud to Beg comes on, and inside a minute grown adults with mortgages are dancing with dinner plates. Riding the music back to who they were in college is literally that movie's plot. No arena, no lights. The size most of life actually happens at. 

And then there's the one-seater. 

The secret song. Everybody has one. You'll tell anyone your five. The sixth is different. It matches nothing … your clothes, your job, your shelf of serious records … and you'd sooner hand a stranger your tax return. It's a time machine with one seat, and it goes somewhere you've never taken anyone. That's why you guard it. 

Mine involves Morris Day, a dance you do with your arms, and a whoa-whoa. Lifetime audience: two. My daughters. Nobody else has seen it. Nobody else will. 

Eighteen thousand. Eight. One. Same machine, all the way down. 

The Rabbit Hole 

One story for each size, for the ones who want to know how the machines get built. 

Nobody knows why a song works at arena size. Queen decided not to leave it to chance. 1977, Bingley Hall in Stafford. They finish the encore and walk off, and the crowd doesn't stop … keeps singing, not Queen songs, their own song, You'll Never Walk Alone, thousands of voices to an empty stage. Brian May stood there, in his words, completely knocked out. So he went home and built a song the audience could play. Stomp, stomp, clap. Two minutes, no instruments at all until the solo. He's said it plainly: it was designed as a joining-in song. We Will Rock You was written for you. The band just starts it. 

The kitchen machine got rebuilt by accident. The Big Chill soundtrack put a decade of sixties soul back into every kitchen in America, nearly twenty years after the fact. A whole generation met the Temptations while clearing a table. Nobody planned it. The songs just found new rooms. 

And the one-seater. Here's the part I love. The Time, on record, mostly wasn't a band. Prince wrote and played nearly everything himself under a fake name, Jamie Starr, with Morris Day singing over the top. The Bird is the exception … the one track on Ice Cream Castle where the actual band actually plays, recorded live at First Avenue in Minneapolis, October 1983, the same club where they shot Purple Rain. Even then, Prince took the tape home and overdubbed it. So my secret song has a secret of its own. The band on it barely existed. 

Maybe that's why it's the sixth and not one of the five. The five are who you are. The sixth is who you'd be if nobody was watching. Mine has an audience of two, and they both call me Dad. 

You can't explain any of them. You can't hand someone the car, the kitchen, the dance. But you can sit them down and play it, in a room that carries everything the song is carrying. Sometimes they just hear a song. And sometimes, for three minutes, they stand where you were standing. 

We've built rooms where every size of machine runs. 

Bring your five. 

And the sixth … we never ask. We just play it. 

Aren't we lucky. 

-Sean