I was driving in the car a few days ago and heard a song [classical, but with a lot of trumpets and with a Latin flair] that I knew was not going a be a song that I liked… and I loved it.

At that moment.

I’ve had enough of these experiences like that to know that if I went home and looked this piece up on Amazon and played a few clips, or worse yet, bought the CD, I would not like it all that much.

I remember hearing Bolero in the car one day, loving it, and then looking up the particular piece and… could take it or leave it.

All this is to say, for sake of argument, that at any time during our lives, there is an optimal song we could/should be listening to. That we would just LOVE at the particular moment.

You see, usually we just say we like a particular piece of music, a song, a group of musicians, because on average, we enjoy listening to their work.

Maybe we have listened to them enough that we have experienced this ‘right song at the right time’ phenomena while listening to them, which is some very positive reinforcement that we have chosen the right ‘favorite thing’ to be listening to a lot.

OK. So here it is, 12:05pm the Wednesday before Christmas. What would be the optimal song for me to be listening to now?

Is there any way to actually determine what it is?

Jerry Maguire: it takes a few tries, but he finally finds his Right Song at the Right Time

At the time of the most recent experience in the car, I was kind of spacing out, kind of bored, the landscape, albeit strikingly beautiful snow-covered pines in the Rocky Mountains, was black and white and dark green and coming across my brain as forbidding and soporific. The music, on the other hand, was upbeat and kind of tongue-in-cheek and simple enough to render OK on the Bose stereo.

So, can we just examine our mood and narrow down our choices of what to listen to, thereby increasing our chances of being able to hear The Right Song?

Through experience and observation, I think one can narrow down the genre where the Right Song, on average, might be found in the following circumstances/mood (YMMV):

Drunk: George Thorogood, Elvis Costello and other bar-band music
Tipsy: Country Music, Everything!
Morning brews: Bluegrass
Morning hangover: New Age
Leisurely long-term boredom: Classical
Stoned: Reggae, Everything!
Hallucinogens: Grateful Dead
Sad: The Blues [weird, I know]
Happy: Any one of your all time favorite songs [see Jerry Maguire clip]
Angry: Heavy Metal, Rap
Energetic: Rock & Roll

Are their other ways to narrow down and quickly find the Right Song? If you have ever tried to do this, and who hasn’t, you soon realize that the very process of trying to find the right song, even listening to a few that are NOT the right song, affects us so much that the Right Song will no doubt have changed from what it was to something completely different.

When we complain about ‘there is nothing to listen to, with 5000 CDs here, and untold 100,000s of songs online, we are really saying: “I have no idea what my Right Song for this moment is, and not knowing SUCKS!” 🙂