On the way to a midnight movie one of my favorite songs came on the radio, "Midnight Confessions" by The Grass Roots. When I was a kid I was addicted to oldies radio and this punchy little white soul number from '68 always thrilled me. In my mental jukebox it's right next to "The Letter" by The Box Tops (one of Alex Chilton's finest moments, Big Star notwithstanding) and "People Got to Be Free" by The Rascals. I always loved songs that were way before my time because they were generous and likable but strange and exotic, harboring something sad and unknowable under the easy surface charm of their AM radio sound. If you treat them carefully, pop songs can surprise you with the mysterious ability to resist triteness, the desiccation of overexposure, time's tendency to turn them into simple artifacts. They aren't ruined by decades of the wrong kind of attention by other people, provided you do your part by honoring the singular irreducible nature of your relationship to them. Songs like these are someone else's cheap nostalgia maybe but not mine. I assiduously protect my emotional reactions to them, probably more so than I do my feelings for people I love. My feelings about an old lost friend, for instance, become more and more vaporous as time goes on, no matter what I do I can't hold on and keep them alive because there is nothing real in the world to anchor them. There is no old friend anymore, he's just a memory. He might still be around somewhere but it doesn't matter, he's different now, even if we were to get together it wouldn't be the same. People unlike songs refuse to stay put in suspended animation until that time I choose to revisit them. People are wayward that way (they have this thoughtless desire to have lives of their own), whereas a song happily collects the feelings I have about it, it acquires a patina over time but it also retains the residue of that initial blast of affection from long ago, and after sometimes years of patiently waiting for my regard it gives back to me exactly what I invested in it, miraculously.