Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Memory

Tonight as I was listening to some music from my old collection, I came across Indecent Obsession’s Fixing a Broken Heart. The memory from my teenage years couldn’t stop flowing after that. I started to rambling in Youtube and found the Lady Rain and so on.

Long time ago when I was still in junior high, my cousin gave an audio cassette for my sister. It was full of the top list music he taped from the radio. My sister and I were so in love with the tape that we played it over and over again. Another celeb-craving cousin came with the lyrics and the three of us sang the whole night together. I guess it was the first time I became so into music and lyrics in English. I was able to memorize all the lyrics of all the songs in that tape even though I didn’t speak English. I still even remember that the tape began with Take That - Back for Good, then Key to My Life from Boyzone (I was so crazy about Ronan Keating, thought he was the most good looking boy in the world, uh..oh..). I forget what came on the third track, but Julia Says came on fourth. Michael & the Mechanics was on the other side track. I mastered the whistling technique because of Over My Shoulder. Frente was also in that tape. I can’t remember the other songs, but believe me, it was the best tape I’d ever had. Well, even though it was a gift for my sister, but when I was little almost everything that belonged to my sister belonged to me too. Sadly the tape is gone now. I’m quite sure it was my sister’s fault. She liked to lend her stuffs to some friends that kept loosing her stuffs.

After that, I started to tape the music played on the radio by myself and I collected quite a lot. I mastered the radio taping technique pretty good. No clicking sound and no DJ talking. I knew the time when the DJ would play the whole complete song without talking in between or cut the song with some adverts. It was the midnight broadcasting. This also brought me to meet (I mean to listen to) Ivan, the DJ from Oz 103 fm who had a really soothing voice. I fell in love with his voice and always waited for him every single night. Still remember the way he said “Bye now” at the end of the show.

I also became obsessed with finding out the lyrics so that I could sing along with the songs. We didn’t have Internet and Google didn’t exist yet, so I had to work hard on it. I kept pushing the play-stop-rewind buttons just to be able to decipher and write the lyrics. I then created my own “English”.

One last memory. I also once really liked the song from Gary Barlow as he started going solo, Forever Love. My sister mocked me all the time because of Garry’s humming in some part of the song, that according to her, sounds like a dog howling. Ugh..ugh… no offense, Gary…