Where Were You & What Were You Doing when you heard What Became YOUR FAVORITE SONG(s) for the very first time?

Probably "Give It Away" by the RHCP, then later "Cannonball" by the Breeders.

those pizzicatos,
so soul but so avant-garde,
hit my kid ears hard

I would run to turn
our stereo up full-blast!
I think I was eight

The only TV-related epiphany I had comparable to Alex's was seeing (& hearing) Jimi Hendrix for the first time during a late-night viewing of "Woodstock". Who knew guitars could sound like that?!

Vladislav Delay - Anima
Right so its late 2001 and maybe 2 in the morning and I've just come home from a club in San Francisco. Grooverider spun, which is rare for the West Coast, and he spun well, which is rare for every coast. I'm totally exhausted, dehydrated and I've got 6 hours to pound out sixty pages of a screenplay. It's either write right now or pass out and fail this course, go back on academic probation, lose financial aid, die undiploma'd and alone, etc.

More than anything, I realized as I fired up Word, I needed music.

The crinkled yellow Amoeba Records bag is upended onto my bed. Pawing through stack I found the pale blue and white cover that I had spent minutes staring at while I debated the $15.99 pricetag. I knew a little about Mille Plateaux but this was the first time in a long time I had shelled-out for music I hadn't, ahem, previewed online. But who was this Vladislav Delay guy, anyway?

With the throb of a mild case of tinnitus I popped the plastic wrap and pressed play. And... I started writing the damn screenplay.

What struck me about Anima was these beautifully organic drones and loops were overdubbed with what sounded like Delay shuffling around his studio cleaning up the place. How totally in-sync with the way ambient and instrumental music integrates into my life. Rarely am I able to devote my full attention to the activity of listening. But for those brief moments between breathes...

It's like yeah, here we are.

Too bad the screenplay turned out crap.

"Titles please, people."

Sorry Alex:

The Damned - New Rose.

Fwiw, I believe the first time I heard your favourite song was the first time The Joke played it live; which was at The Lyceum in '84 IIRC.

I was about 10, it was Thanksgiving day, and we were en route to a great-aunt's house for the turkey feast. We stopped at a Uni-Mart convenience store so I could run inside and grab something, I forget what (probably cigarettes for my mom -- the store had no qualms selling them to me at that time). "Miracles" by the Jefferson Starship was playing on the piped-in radio. I felt I'd heard it before, that I'd always known it ... and was so in awe of it that I stayed inside the store for the whole 7 minutes (to my family's great annoyance). Still amazed, every time I hear it, by the intricacies of the backing vox and David Freiberg's pearly keys.

Oh you lucky monkey!

The radio, my room. Thirteen? Playing some video game, I can't remember what. It seemed like all edges disappeared.

Oh, and we all took mushrooms.

Anyway, the album he brought over to listen to during the slide show was MBV's "Loveless" - the first time I ever heard it. A wonderful introduction to the album. I still see those beautiful pictures in my head when I hear Only Shallow.

It was a cloudy day all morning, but just as I first heard what I guess is my favourite song on my cousin's radio, the sun came out.

"I Can See Clearly Now" - Johnny Nash

it was about 8 pm, i was supine up in a loft type area in my uncle's giant cedar cabin-mansion surrounded by govt. land, looking out the windows on 3 sides and ceiling to an endless maw of firs and the stars like bite marks. the first song [eat y'self fitter] was like an andy kaufman joke, alternately funny then not then funny again because it keeps going. its minimalist structure seemed like a narrow chute which i fell down into the harrowing see-the-bruise-colors-whirl-inside-your-retina crash of the next song, the neighborhood of infinity, which became, and still is i think, my favorite song of all time.

i don't really know why that song does it for me, but it just seems to be the most menacing, cryptic, razor-vined inca object at the heart of a borges story left in a jungle, too heavy to lift maybe, or explicative of the future death of someone i have never heard of. i had that feeling then, and still get it, of little chills; we all get this on songs we like a lot, and i get it stronger and more pleasurably with this than with anything else. i also get a sort of rush of dream-associations, like when you remember a face you saw in a dream you had the night before, and that makes connections for you.