Song Books

I was moving some stuff around in the basement tonight when I came across my high school "junk." I have a few small boxes I peek in occasionally when I'm feeling nostalgic. But this time I looked in a bag that had some notebooks in it.

I thought perhaps it was from some class (don't ask why I'd save something like that, but it's not unheard of). Instead the notebook I pulled out said "SONGS -- written down by Robyn Hedberg" -- as if I wanted to be clear that I didn't write the songs, just wrote them down!

So I page through it and just had to chuckle. These were lyrics to songs I must have had to listen to a dozen times on the radio to piece them all together, then write them down very neatly in this SONG book.

I had everything from Air Supply's "All Out of Love" and Survivor's "Search is Over" to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Most times I wrote down the artist. And sometimes the year. Sometimes I don't think I knew who sang the song but I liked it and heard it enough on Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown to figure out the lyrics. For example, for the song "Suddenly" -- sung by Olivia Newton-John and Cliff Richard -- I just identified their parts as "woman" and "man." (I wonder if it's too late to fill that in now?)

Today, all a person would have to do is go online and type in any part of the lyrics -- not even the chorus -- and they would be matched up to dozens of websites that can tell you in an instant who sang it along with every word to the song and, of course, an opportunity to buy it and download it immediately! What fun is that?

I feel sorry for this generation and the ones to come. They never really have to work for their information -- whether it's song lyrics or historical facts once found only in big, dusty, musty encyclopedias -- so they never will feel that same sense of satisfaction when they finally find it!

You can bet that once I was pretty sure I had the whole song pieced together that I was ecstatic the next time I heard it on the radio, followed along and realized yes, I had another complete item to write down in that blue spiral notebook. What a sense of accomplishment!

Yep those poor kids today are missing out. And don't get me started on taping songs from the Countdown onto cassette tapes. I'm not talking about the tape deck in your stereo. I mean the good ol' fashioned "hold the microphone up to the speaker and press Record" system. You ain't got nothin' on me, iTunes!

Ahhh, time to go brush up on some REO Speedwagon... Perhaps I'll send out a long-distance dedication to you!