Come On Eileen

Oliver was experimenting with a Spotify-playlist-generating website called Momixa last night: you enter two songs and Momixa generates a Spotify playlist from your choices (there’s a rich ecosystem of sites like this; Oliver’s explored almost all of them).

I asked him to try it out for me, and, on the spur of the moment, rattled off two songs from my youth: Baby Come Back by Player, and You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone. Here’s the playlist that got generated:

If you’re a Spotify user, you can load up the playlist yourself simply by clicking on that link.

There are a couple of issues worthy of note here:

1. Both of the anchor songs were released in 1977, when I was 11 years old.
2. I owned copies of both songs on 45 rpm records (this likely raised their profile on the tip of my tongue).
3. Listening to that playlist immediately transports me back to the mid-1970s. I think I know the words, on some level at least, to all of those songs.

Thinking back, I imagine that 1977 was a formative year for me music-wise. I was likely taking the Canada Coach Lines bus into Hamilton every Saturday morning and stopping in at the record shops to buy 45s and albums (But what record store was it? It says here that Sam’s didn’t open in Hamilton until the late 1980s). I had a hifi in my room, and a radio under my pillow to listen to while falling asleep.