"Tanacara"
Gonzaguinha
from Corações Marginais
1988
This car we're renting while our car is in the shop doesn't have an auxiliary jack, at least not one that I can find, which means two things. One, I would never buy this car, even if I could afford it, I mean, c'mon, you're a fucking LOSER car company if you're bailing on the aux cord. And two, I've been listening to XPN just a hair more than usual.
There was one point when I turned the key in the ignition (sorry... pushed the button to turn on the car, this stupid fucking car) and XPN was in the middle of playing a song that I recognized. Kind of. Those flutes were oddly familiar. It was stuck in my head for a couple of hours until I could get some WiFi, and scrolled through the helpful ongoing playlist that they keep on the website to find what song it was. Listen above, if you'd like.
Have you ever tried to figure out where you know a song from? You have a few different options. One, you can trust Google to put in the work, search for the title and maybe throw in a "where from" and hope that other people had the same inquiry as you and that someone took the time to answer it. There's a specific website if you think it's from a movie or TV show that groups by samples and by visual media. I think that there's also an app that I would never use because of technological limitations, but it'll hear a song and tell you what the song is? But I don't think that's helpful in what I'm talking about, because it doesn't tell you about where you know it from, just what it is.
"Tanacara" had no imprint on the search engines of the internet, so where do I turn? There's really nowhere else to go, beyond into the depths of your own mind. So I listened to "Tanacara" a few more times, and suddenly, it came to me—the answer is WXPN itself. There was a regular announcement for a radio show that featured a piece of this song. Was it an old World Café ad or something? Maybe whoever used to host the program would briefly announce who that day's guest was going to be while "Tanacara" played in the background.
That's gotta be it. I wonder if I had heard the lead-in to the song that day, I would've heard the DJ mention why listeners might recognize the song. But I missed that part, so I'll never know. And the part about it that rankles me the most is that I still can't find any answers on google, even with this large clue. No one thought to record Radio Host talking over "Tanacara" back in the day and post it on YouTube? I thought everything was on YouTube?
Oh well. I'm going to trust my own brain on this subject, and just assume that the flutes in this song would show up daily on WXPN, once upon a time. Maybe someone on this blog can confirm it for me. If not, I'm satisfied just enough that this isn't going to bother me.
I've always liked the idea of arbitrarily choosing a song, and attaching that song to something, and, through repetition of that thing, you give the song new meaning. You always hear people say "When I hear X song, I always think of Y," which is legit, and what I'm saying here is that this phenomenon can be manufactured. That's what TV shows do all the time. Songs exist but then are chosen as the song for the opening credits, and now that TV show is all you can think of if you hear the song out in the wild.
At some point, some radio host heard this song and its sweet flute riffs and was like, "I'm going to use that." And they did, and now, years later, I hear those same flutes and am able to, after a little digging, uncover a memory that I haven't thought about in years. Music is fucking wild, how it sticks with you like that. One of the many reasons I spend so much time listening.
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