'A song you listen to when you’re happy.’
And another thing. I can listen to pretty much anything when I’m happy, because I don’t need my mood to be lifted: most of all, I don’t want my mood to be changed. I want to preserve the mood in aspic for as long as I can. Happiness can have a fragility about it these days. Life is so pressurised, has such a rapid pace, that a feeling or a mood can change in seconds like the passing clouds on a windy spring day. The best I can do when I’m happy and want it to last is to be resolute. Not let anything, or anyone, take the happiness away: and that goes for music as well as people and workload and - well, life.
So I’ll pick something I like. Something that makes me smile. An old favourite or something new - upbeat or reflective, depending on what sort of ‘happy’ it is. Because happy can mean lots of things: it can mean that upbeat feeling of positivity which puts a skip in your step and make you feel like making jokes with everyone you see. It can also mean that calm, low-key contendedness which might not be expressed by laughter or a change of pace, but which instead is felt quietly - as you smile to yourself, imperceptibly perhaps, at a moment or a memory or something you’ve realised. It can be anything in between these extremes, with mixtures of both, and the song for feeling happy will have to match itself to how you feel.
I might pick ‘Rolling in the Deep’ by Adele, if I’m thinking about a recent song for when I feel happy. Maybe that’s because I managed to make someone laugh by making reference to this song on Twitter earlier this evening, and because making people laugh makes me happy, even if I’m feeling nothing like laughing myself. I love how this song builds to a climax as the first chorus crashes in - it never fails to make me smile. The only thing about this song, though, is that it’s made me realise something about myself… that I’m rather a pain in the neck where the demotic appreciation of music is concerned. Because I loved this song from the first time I heard it, but then the album went to No.1, for months and months, and suddenly the song was everywhere. Shops - fitting rooms - cafes - 24/7 on the radio - television trailers… and it began to get annoying. What was making me happy was starting to get annoying and there we see it working as it always does: happiness is a fragile thing. It’s like an ice cube on a hot day. Leave it long enough and it inevitably starts to melt. Once the song was everywhere, it lost its specialness - though none of that will never stop me liking it, any more than other people’s happiness can ever lessen mine.
I might pick ‘The Sound of Summer’ by The Adventures. This song catapults me right back to the summer when I did my A levels. I was definitely happy then: I had university ahead, I was finishing school and, much as I’d enjoyed it, I was ready to move on. I had a few good friends whom I knew I was going to miss, but I knew the next step was going to be an exciting one. Moving away - moving on - moving up, I suppose most people would have said. ‘The Sound of Summer’ seemed to sum a lot of it up. The Northern Irish childhood - the backdrop of political tensions merging with the tensions of growing up. The heatwave during my revision and exams: revising in the garden and all of us comparing our sunburn to cover up our nerves as we waited in the foyer outside the exam hall. The complicity of smiles with those few good friends as we psyched ourselves up for those endless three-hour papers. The promise of the long summer days ahead… and the inevitability of the anti-climax when the weather degenerated from heatwave to rain and wind and 14 degrees centigrade, and the days seemed so empty without all that revision that it seemed quite easy to fill them with my intimidating university reading lists. ‘The Sound of Summer’ is as dated now as we hope the Northern Irish troubles are, but it still makes me smile at the memories and the people and the excitement and anticipation which bubbled almost uncontainably beneath my nervousness and exhaustion as I scribbled furiously with my black ink pen throughout that long month of exams.
Happiness is fragile. It’s a memory and an aspiration. It’s the everlasting feeling of being a child again, in the back seat of the family car, asking over and over and over again if we’re there yet. Because if you’re there, if you’ve arrived, you’re wondering about the next destination, and if you’re thinking about what’s next then you’re just not properly happy any more. It’s the joy of passing road signs and envisaging the destination. It’s the excitement about what’s coming next - not the arrival and the wondering whether somewhere else is better. It’s the moment. The tiny moth which can be crushed between the fingertips. The mayfly which lives for a day. The moment when you look around the room at the people you’re with and realise that you feel absolutely and perfectly at home.
Happiness is the experience in your life which makes all the sadnesses bearable.
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