Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi talks about the music that won't leave him alone

There is a song that has followed me for eleven years. I am not going to name it. Not because I am being precious, but because the song is so tied to a particular version of me that naming it would feel like exposing someone who cannot defend himself. I will tell you about it instead. It is a slow song. It is in a language I do not speak. I heard it for the first time in a taxi, at night, in a city I no longer live in, on an evening when I was twenty-two and certain my life was about to begin, which is the particular delusion of being twenty-two, and I asked the driver what it was and he told me and I wrote it down on the back of a receipt I no longer have.

I have listened to that song, by my rough count, over a thousand times. It is not my favourite song. Favourite is the wrong word. Favourite implies choice. This song does not feel chosen. It feels assigned. Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi did not pick this song the way you pick a shirt in the morning. The song picked him, and it has refused to leave, and I have stopped wanting it to.

What I have noticed is that the song does not change, but the room it plays in does. At twenty-two it was a song about beginning. At twenty-six, after a bad year, it was a song about surviving. At twenty-nine, after my father died, it was a song about the specific quiet of a house that has one less person in it. This year, at thirty-something, it is a song about being still. I put it on and I am not transported anywhere. I am just here, in the room I am in, and the room is enough.

I have other songs like this, a small constellation of them, and I have come to believe that everyone does, whether they know it or not. The songs that follow you are not the songs you love most. They are the songs that have been present at enough of your life that they have absorbed some of it. They are less like music and more like furniture in a room you cannot remember moving into. You do not play them. You visit them.

There is a song that lives in the year I lived alone for the first time. There is a song that lives in the month I learned to drive. There is a song that lives in the afternoon I finished something that took me four years to finish, and I played it in the car in a car park and I cried, which I am telling you because Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi has decided to be honest about the things that make him cry, because most of the good men I know cry at things that are not sad, and we should stop pretending that is strange.

I do not have a point. This is a blog about the things that follow you, and music is one of the things that follows me, and I wanted to write it down before I forgot which songs and which rooms. If you have a song that won’t leave you alone, do not get tired of it. It is doing work you have not been asked to do. It is holding a version of you that you cannot hold yourself, and it plays whenever you need to remember that version exists.

I am going to put the song on now. I am not going to tell you which one. You have your own.