I’m sitting in a restaurant in an airport, eating breakfast before waiting for my flight.
A song is playing overhead from speakers set in the ceiling, and it brings me back to a different place.
Many different places all at once.
Ballrooms. Barns. Tents. Museums. Vinyards. Historic homes. Botanical gardens. Breweries.
The song is “Firework” by Katy Perry. It’s a song I once played at weddings when I was working as a DJ every weekend. People loved this song. It always brought them running to the dance floor.
Katy Perry’s song ends, and a moment later, I hear Lady Gaga. She’s singing “Just Dance.” Here in this faux diner in an airport terminal at 6:30 AM, I’m listening to another staple of wedding music from a decade ago. Another song I once played for brides and grooms and their wedding guests.
Another song that people loved.
And then, as if to punch me in the face, that song ends, and the next is Mark Ronson’s “Upstown Funk.” Another banger of a song for any wedding DJ fifteen years ago.
Is this what happens to music that once compelled human beings to end their conversations midsentence and leave their wedding cake behind to shake their hips on the dance floor?
Does it eventually become the background music? Elevator music? Music I listen to while eating scrambled eggs with a plastic fork in a sad, little airport restaurant?
My breakfast is only okay.
I despise the plastic cutlery that so many airports and hotels are using for breakfast these days.
Traveling alone can be lonely, which is how I’m feeling this morning.
But listening to music that once made people so joyous, repurposed for early morning listening, is somehow the worst of all.
