Earlier today, as I was performing the mundane task of filling out some forms, I was lifted out of the ordinary by a sequence of three songs that played on Pandora, on my Donovan channel (today just felt like a Donovan day, as opposed to an Erik Satie or Scarlatti or Solomon Burke or The Clash or Blood Sweat and Tears kind of day, to name some of my other channels):

1. “Writer in the Sun” — This sent quite a chill, and not just because of the song’s inherent haunting quality. I first heard this when I was 15 or 16, under unusual circumstances. One day in my social studies class at Robinson High School in Tampa, my teacher for some reason decided to bring in a turntable and play some records while we read. Maybe he wanted some down time; maybe he wanted to demonstrate to us what a cool teacher he was. Anyway, it was the first time I had ever heard the album “Donovan In Concert,” and something about it, something about hearing those sounds from the Anaheim Convention Center bouncing off the quiet classroom walls, flipped a switch and put my mind into an altered state — and without smoking banana peel. Donovan had meant nothing to me before that day, but I would go out and buy that album, and that same state of calm alertness would come over my mind whenever I listened to it subsequently. Anyway, it really struck me as ironic that, having drunk a couple of cups of coffee on an empty stomach, sitting in a dry, quiet office as the rain fell outside, 40 years later, I would find myself clicking into that same state of mind listening to this studio version of a song on that album. And it hit me suddenly — I may not be sitting in the sun, but in a sense I am a “retired writer.” It may be only technically — I took early retirement from the paper several months after being laid off (which brings me the lordly pension of about one-seventh of my salary at the paper) — and I may have no intention of actually retiring, as a writer or as anything else, for another decade and more, but it still struck me as terribly relevant. I could sense the distance in time traveled since that day in 1968 or 69, but feel at the same time like no time had passed at all. Must be the caffeine on the empty stomach.
2. “Let It Be” — Quite possibly my favorite pop song of all time. It’s from about a year after the Donovan incident. Also fraught with meaning. Quick anecdote — the year it came out I was singing in a youth choir at the base chapel at MacDill AFB, with a decidedly non-angelic group of friends (in retrospect it’s surprising some of those people were involved in anything like that) — and we persuaded the adult who ran the group to let us sing “Let it Be” during a chapel service. Anyway, one of the Air Force chaplains refused to let us sing it because it had — gasp! — Catholic overtones (perhaps this was the genesis of my later conversion). Mind you, this was a generic protestant group. And our adviser wasn’t inclined to fight about it because she had heard — gasp again — that “Mother Mary” could be a reference to the dreaded Mary Jane. If only she knew that my friend Jack always had a couple of joints in the cigarette pack he kept in his shirt pocket during choir practice. Anyway, awesome song. Hard to believe that Paul McCartney wrote and sang that at about the same time as the insipid “Long and Winding Road.” Did he know the difference at the time?
3. “Just Like a Woman” — To the extent that Dylan had a song that effect that same “click” in the head as “Writer” and “Let It Be,” this would be it. Powerful evocation of Everywoman in a young man’s head, and what that means.

After that, the songs got pretty ordinary. I eventually switched off the channel. But there for a few minutes, it was pretty special.