THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 7

I Feel a Song in My Heart

When I opened the diary on 1 July 2024, the day had already been given a soundtrack. I had not selected it, pressed a button or consciously searched through the shelves of memory for something suitable. “I Feel a Song (In My Heart)”¹ was simply there, playing inside my head before the rest of me had properly reported for duty. It was less like remembering a song than arriving late to a broadcast that had begun without waiting for its audience.

That distinction matters because it was never one of my favourite songs. I did not carry it around as a personal anthem, place it carefully on a playlist or reach for it when I wanted to improve the mood. It kept turning up, which is not the same thing at all. A favourite song is invited; this one appeared to possess a key.

The internal radio station had been doing that for years, although I had not always thought of it as a station. Songs would rise from somewhere below deliberate thought, sometimes complete enough to recognise immediately and sometimes no more than a phrase, a rhythm or a few notes circling until the title eventually surrendered. Not speaking for anybody else, my mind seems to wander continuously through a repository of songs accumulated across a lifetime. The shelves are badly labelled, the filing system would not survive an audit and yet the retrieval process is often remarkably fast.

The station also has an irritating disregard for personal taste. It does not confine itself to songs I love, songs I admire or even songs I would willingly choose to hear twice. It runs over with whatever happens to be available, as though every tune ever admitted has acquired permanent broadcasting rights. Somewhere inside me there appears to be a program director with access to the full archive and no obligation to explain the schedule.

That morning’s selection was cheerful enough on the surface. The title suggested uplift, motion and the possibility that the heart had begun singing before the body had considered getting out of bed. It might have been interpreted as a promising start, particularly by someone determined to turn every accidental occurrence into a message from the universe. I was not yet prepared to grant the universe that much editorial control.

The diary eventually became A Year in My Shoes, but on that first morning it was only an attempt to record what was happening inside the days. The song therefore became more than a tune because it arrived at the doorway of the project and stood there as though it had been booked for the opening ceremony. I did not know then how frequently music would interrupt the entries, comment on them or wander across them without any obvious relevance. The formal record began with the discovery that another record was already playing.

There is a temptation, once a pattern has been noticed, to improve it with hindsight. Memory likes a well-organised story, and writers are not immune from helping it along when the raw material refuses to behave. I could now claim that the song announced the entire year, that it predicted the book or that some wiser part of me had selected the perfect overture. The truth is less tidy and therefore more interesting: it turned up, I noticed it, and because I noticed it I began listening more carefully to what followed.

That listening raised a question I still cannot answer. Was the station reporting the emotional weather already present, or was it helping to create it? A song arriving before waking thought might be the mind’s equivalent of a forecast, detecting pressure systems that consciousness has not yet named. It might also be a small act of manufacture, setting the temperature of the day before the rest of the machinery has begun.

The analytical part of me would prefer a controlled experiment. We would need comparable mornings, reliable mood measurements, a record of the first song heard and some method of separating cause from coincidence. The human part of me knows that mornings do not line up for examination with their variables neatly contained. By the time I have noticed the song, wondered why it is there and begun to attach meaning to it, the experiment has already been contaminated by the observer.

Perhaps that is why songs are so effective inside the mind. They arrive with emotion already attached, even when the words are only partly remembered and the original meaning has been misplaced. A few notes can open a room, recover a face or return the body to a road travelled decades earlier. They do not ask permission from logic before they begin moving the furniture.

The repository is not simply a collection of music. It contains voices, places, periods of life and versions of myself that may no longer be available by any other route. A song heard in youth does not remain fixed at the age when it entered; it travels forward, gathering new meanings as the listener acquires more life to place against it. The same tune may first offer escape, later become nostalgia and eventually return as evidence that the person who heard it then is still somewhere within the person listening now.

Music was an escape long before I began examining it as one. In vehicles, I have generally preferred the radio tuned to music rather than a station organised around news, argument and the hourly confirmation that the world remains capable of making a mess of itself. Later came playlists, which offered even greater control over what was allowed into the cabin. The road might still lead through the same world, but for a while the chosen sound could alter the atmosphere in which I travelled through it.

That instinct had roots in youth, when music could create a temporary territory of its own. It did not necessarily repair the madness or horror around me, and I would be giving it powers it never possessed if I claimed that it did. What it could do was establish a boundary, however fragile, between the noise outside and the place within. For the length of a song, there was another rhythm available.

The word horror needs some care because it can make the memory sound more theatrical than it felt at the time. Childhood and youth are rarely lived with the explanatory labels later placed upon them, and much of what surrounds a young person is accepted simply because there is no alternative version with which to compare it. Music did not arrive as a formal treatment for anything. It arrived as sound, company and the possibility of being elsewhere without physically leaving.

That form of escape is easily dismissed because it leaves no visible evidence of movement. The body remains in the room, the vehicle or the house, while the mind slips through a door opened by melody. Yet there are journeys measured in something other than distance, and some of the most useful departures require no luggage. A song can take a person far enough away to breathe and still return them before anybody notices they have gone.

The external radio gave me some choice. I could change stations, turn the volume down or decide that silence was preferable to whatever the announcer had selected. The internal station operates under a less democratic constitution. It sometimes responds to suggestion, but just as often it continues with a tune that has outstayed its welcome, proving that ownership of the head does not necessarily include control of its entertainment system.

There are mornings when the selection appears uncannily accurate. A song arrives carrying weariness, uncertainty, hope or defiance before I have consciously admitted to any of them. On those mornings the station seems less like a disc jockey than an interpreter, translating a condition that the spoken mind has not yet found the courage or energy to name. It may be the heart singing, although sometimes it sounds more like the filing cabinet has fallen open.

There are other mornings when the choice makes no sense at all. The song may be absurdly bright against a heavy mood, irritatingly persistent when quiet would be more useful or completely unrelated to any thought I can identify. That does not necessarily mean it has no connection; it may simply mean the connection is buried too deeply or was formed too long ago for conscious retrieval. It may also mean that a song is sometimes only a song, and the program director has filled three minutes because dead air was considered worse.

This is where the writer must be watched. Once a book has been built around words that remained, the temptation is to treat every tune as prophetic and every accidental lyric as coded correspondence. That would give the station a dignity it has not earned. Some broadcasts may carry emotional intelligence, while others may be the mental equivalent of finding an old single at the back of a cupboard and putting it on because nothing better is within reach.

“I Feel a Song (In My Heart)” sits somewhere between those possibilities. It did not explain the year that followed, cure anything or provide a set of instructions for navigating retirement, depression, work, family or the uncertainty gathering around identity. It did, however, announce the existence of the station clearly enough for me to begin treating it as evidence. The song mattered less for what it said than for the fact that it had arrived before I had asked a question.

Perhaps the station had always been doing more work than I understood. It may have been sorting experience into forms the mind could tolerate, placing emotion inside rhythm and allowing difficult things to approach without immediately demanding names. Spoken thought can be blunt, particularly when the analytical mind has decided that accuracy is more important than kindness. Music can carry the same information indirectly, giving the human part of me time to recognise what the other part is already trying to calculate.

That does not make the station wise. It may be responsive, associative, protective or merely busy, and those descriptions are not interchangeable. The Black Dog sometimes entered the listening room, but it did not control every selection and should not be credited with a broadcasting monopoly. There were days when the music provided resistance to darkness, days when it seemed to deepen it and days when it had nothing to do with it at all.

More troubling than an unwanted song could be the absence of one. When the station went silent, I could not always tell whether I had been granted peace or whether some internal system had shut down. Noise can be exhausting, but complete silence is not automatically restful when a person has become accustomed to waking with evidence that the mind is already moving. The difference between quiet and emptiness is often discovered only after sitting with both.

The diary made the station visible because writing required me to pause long enough to record what had previously passed as background. Once I began noting the songs, they became part of the day’s evidence alongside sleep, pain, work, weather, family, golf, worry and whatever else had found its way into the entry. They were not necessarily more important than those things. They were simply another instrument on the dashboard, occasionally useful and occasionally flashing for reasons no mechanic could explain.

There is also a difference between listening to music and being listened to by it. A chosen playlist confirms preference, but an unchosen song can feel as though some part of the self has placed a hand on the shoulder and asked for attention. That sensation may be entirely constructed after the event, yet construction does not make it meaningless. Much of identity is built from the stories we tell about what happened inside us when nobody else was present to verify it.

The song’s title contains an intimacy that the actual experience complicates. A song in the heart sounds warm and voluntary, as though joy has overflowed into melody. My station was more mechanical, unruly and indiscriminate than that, running over with fragments that could be joyful, ridiculous, mournful or simply persistent. The heart may have supplied some of them, but memory, habit and the restless machinery of the brain were clearly applying for equal credit.

I have spent much of my life translating complexity into language other people could use. In business, the task was often to hear the technical answer and then find the human words capable of carrying it across the table without diminishing the person receiving it. The internal radio may have been performing a similar translation upon me. It took material I had not yet organised and delivered it in a form already shaped by rhythm, repetition and feeling.

That possibility is attractive, but it must remain a possibility. I cannot prove that the station knew what I needed, and there were enough foolish selections to weaken any claim of consistent intelligence. What I can say is that music often arrived before explanation and sometimes remained after explanation had failed. The words did not always solve the condition, but they gave it somewhere to stand.

By the time I began the diary, the archive inside me was already enormous. It contained songs consciously loved, songs half forgotten, songs heard once too often and songs that appeared to have been retained against all reasonable expectations. The year did not create the station; it merely placed a microphone near it. What had once been background noise became part of the inquiry into who was speaking, who was listening and why certain selections continued returning.

I still do not regard “I Feel a Song (In My Heart)” as a favourite. Its place in this book has not been earned through ranking, devotion or the claim that it is the finest expression of anything. It belongs because it turned up at the beginning and then kept turning up, behaving less like a chosen theme than a persistent witness. Some songs are carried because we love them, while others remain because they appear to have decided that we are not finished with them.

The station continues to run, although its schedule remains unavailable and complaints to management have produced no response. I listen differently now because the diary taught me that an apparently random tune may be worth noticing without immediately being forced into meaning. Sometimes the song reports the weather, sometimes it changes it and sometimes it merely fills the air while the day assembles itself. The mystery is not solved, but the microphone is on, and I have begun to recognise that listening may be one of the ways a voice learns to become its own.

Notes

1. “I Feel a Song (In My Heart)” was written by Tony Camillo and Mary Sawyer. The version remembered in this chapter was recorded by Gladys Knight & the Pips and released in 1974 on the album I Feel a Song; earlier recordings preceded their version.