Listening to 6music the other day and Steve Jones of Sex Pistols fame played an awful cover of The Velvet Underground's 'Femme Fatale'. I hadn't previously thought of it as one of my favourite Velvet Underground songs, but just hearing this cover gave me shivers thinking of the original. In fact I think I appreciate all the songs featuring Nico a lot more than I once did. The strange thing though was that the song had gone from being a song I thought little of to one of my favourites without me actually hearing it.
The most extreme case of this happening to me was with Belle & Sebastian's 'The Fox in The Snow'. I bought the album it features on 'If You're Feeling Sinister', listened to it a few times, thought it was ok, then promptly filed it away and didn't listen to it for years. One day walking home, it suddenly popped into my mind as one of the most beautiful songs I'd ever heard, and when I listened to it when I got home, so it was. The question again is how it happened without me ever hearing it? What's going on in my subconscious that causes this to happen? I suspect every song I've ever heard is on a loop in there somewhere, with my opinions on them changing without me even being aware, apart from the occasional glorious moment of realisation.
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