Some Songs Leave. Some Just Wait.

Good songs are like good sex. Some hit you with an intensity so unreasonable—such heat, such want—that resistance is a joke. You’re wrecked for a few hours, riding whatever it is, and then they vanish as completely as they arrived. You never hear them quite the same way again. They don’t come back. That’s their whole deal.

The others work differently. They come on slow, maybe even forgettable the first time around—you might ignore one for years, lose it entirely, let it sink into whatever pile of half-remembered things your brain uses as a holding tank. But it’s always there. And when something finally snaps into place and you find it again, there’s nothing to say. You’re just happy, or wrecked, or briefly free. Sometimes all three at once, in that order.