62. Singing Along
My college roommate worked at the radio station and brought home albums right when they were released so that he could decide if he wanted to play anything from them and just for general enjoyment. One album he brought home was Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Toward Ecstasy. We listened together, enjoying it well enough, and when the fifth track, “Mary,” came on, I sang along, as I knew it by heart.
My roommate looked at me like I was crazy. I said, “Oh. I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve known this song my whole life.” The song was written for that album, just like all the other tracks. It wasn’t a cover and had never been released before. It isn’t particularly important to me, it’s just that I remembered it the same way that I could remember the Carole King and Sheena Easton songs my parents played in the seventies.
It was just something I had always known. I’m a skeptic and this is clearly impossible. I have spent real time trying to find some reference to this track having been written well before the rest of the album and maybe covered or performed elsewhere, but I’ve found no such evidence. It is really unimportant but just so inexplicable.