The Feel Good Way

There’s a moment at every wedding reception where you can feel the energy shift. The dinner is done, the speeches are over, and suddenly the real party starts. And this one? This one was good.

The DJ was a professional. Capital P. The kind who reads the room like a book, keeps the energy moving, never lets it drop. All night, the dance floor was packed. All night.

Now, I should confess something. Somewhere around midnight, my elegant party shoes ended up under a table and I swapped them for the old sneakers I’d stashed in a bag. Yes. I was prepared.

Not a pretty sight, I’ll admit. But here’s the thing: nobody noticed. Or if they did, they were too far into the evening to care. And I? I could not have cared less. Because suddenly I was dancing. Really dancing. Like I haven’t done in years. Non-stop, no painful feet, no aching back, fresh as a daisy, light as a feather, moving like I was 20 again.

The sneakers were the best decision I made all night.

But the real highlight wasn’t me.

There was a young man on that dance floor. I know him a little ; we have friends in common, cross paths at parties now and then. Nice guy. Good energy. And that night, he was on.

Not once did I see him stop dancing. Not once. The music went through him, you could actually see it! He wasn’t performing. He was just feeling it completely, fully, without a single moment of self-consciousness.

And he sang. Every. Single. Word.

Not just the chorus. Not just the easy bits everyone knows. Every word, from the first line to the last, loud and joyful and completely uninhibited. Techno. Schlagers. And everything in between. He knew all of it. All of it.

I stood there genuinely amazed.

And then came the question I couldn’t shake: where did that go? When did I stop knowing all the words?

Because I used to. I used to know everything.

Back before Spotify handed us the entire history of recorded music for the price of a coffee, before algorithms decided what you’d probably like next, we had almost nothing. Three radio stations. Two programmes worth listening to. The Top 30 on Saturday afternoon, and Funky Town on Thursday evening.

The same songs, week after week.

And every Saturday, I was stationed at the cassette recorder, finger hovering over the record button, ready to capture whatever came out of that speaker. I’d fill a tape -sixty minutes of music- and when it was full, I’d record over the oldest songs to make room for the new ones. Then I’d put that tape in my Walkman and listen to it until the thing literally broke. Until the ribbon got tangled in the mechanism and the whole thing seized up.

I knew every song by heart. Every intro. Every word. Every key change.

Because I’d listened to the same sixty minutes approximately four thousand times.

That’s the paradox, isn’t it? We have everything now. Millions of songs, instantly, endlessly, without repetition, without effort. Music has never been more available or more abundant.

And yet. For most of us, all that abundance just means we never stop long enough to actually learn anything by heart.

But him? That young man on the dance floor somehow cracked the code that the rest of us didn’t. The flood of music that drowned our memory didn’t touch him. Techno, schlagers, everything in between : it all lives in him, word for word, beat for beat. I have absolutely no idea how he does it. How do you keep up with every song, every word, in a world where new music never stops coming? I can’t figure it out. But there he was, completely lost in the music, singing every single word of every single song, all night long, without missing a beat.

That man has my full and genuine respect.

And watching him -that particular joy of knowing a song so completely it lives inside you- that, right there, is a delight worth chasing.

Image is AI generated