“If I Can’t Change Your Mind” – Sugar
(Words/music: Bob Mould, available on Copper Blue, Rykodisc 1992)

(Note: Thank you to thisistheglamorous (who you should read/follow because he is hilarious and a wonderful read) for reblogging this. I accidentally posted tonight’s post to my personal tumblr and Tumblr won’t let you reblog yourself. Anyway, here’s the original post)

Popular culture – music included – provides an opportunity for escapism. We don’t always consider that with music, though; instead, we focus on connecting to lyrics or emotions in songs – on having music to comfort us or celebrate or anything in between. Occasionally, we consider music as a mood adjuster – something that helps to change our mood, motivate us, or drown out something undesirable. Maybe because I’ve always had an overactive imagination (and that I’ve watched enough movies in my lifetime), but I often spend wandering moments playing out alternate scenarios in my mind. It’s sort of like spontaneous short story writing – it begins with a “what if” question and then I play out one or more of the possible outcomes in my mind. I never think of it actively, but these daydreams often have a soundtrack.

Anyway, I remember having a very vivid sequence one time where I turned “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” upside down. In Sugar’s incredibly catchy version, Bob Mould offers a plea to make a lover stay immediately after a breakup. Whether I was sucked in by the bright guitar and up-beat tempo, my daydream involved using “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” as a method of persuasion; someone using it to help woo over a reluctant love interest. I’m not even clear on the details (and I’m not sure I was at the time, either) – whether it was someone who was hurt previously and unwilling to be vulnerable again or whatever – but nonetheless it was the soundtrack to this strangely vivid out-of-context scene in my head that’s stuck with me. Maybe I imagined the song as a dialogue – the part about being heartbroken and teary was one person and the other replying “if I can’t change your mind, who will?” Maybe in my head romantic comedies expand their soundtrack past the half dozen stock songs that end up in every movie and I wanted to give Bob Mould one of those sweet royalty checks. Probably, though, it was a bit of wishful thinking – we all want to be the kind of person to win each other over, and in both scenarios (the song and this imaginary sequence), the protagonist has a longing to be important and persuasive to a specific person. I’d like to think that my subconscious honed in on this shared idea and made the connection between the real song and the imagined scenario. Maybe I’ve just watched too many movies where music carries this sort of charged emotional persuasion (Say Anything and High Fidelity off the top of my head) that I immediately targeted that part of the song – since it’s so melodically convincing, it must be emotionally as well.

More on Sugar: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm