Twice by Little Dragon

The first time I heard this song it was being played on one of those random digital radio stations that you just happen upon if you spend some time with a DAB radio. I remember being completely mesmerised by it, how spare it was, the hypnotic lull of those two piano keys and that beautiful soaring voice threading in and out of those metronome straight notes.

When it was finished, I immediately wanted to listen to it again. And again after that. Only one problem: I had no idea who the song was by and I didn’t know the lyrics. When I spoke about it to friends, I could only gibber on about how beautiful and ethereal it was, how it made the back of my neck tingle. In fact, all I knew for sure was that if I ever heard this song again, I would know it immediately.

Now, there is a lot you can do nowadays to find a song if you really want to but you need something a little more concrete than a tingle and a good memory but I didn’t let that stop me. I trawled through radio station playlists, I played every nu folk song on last fm, I searched random playlists. I did not hear what I wanted to hear. I did discover Regina Spektor - but that’s a whole different story.

Basically, I have been waiting to hear this song again for almost two years and I found it again just as randomly, playing out a five minute BBC programme on Myths reworked for a teenage audience. I knew it right away. I felt the tingle but this time I had more, I had the lyrics, so I put them into Google and that’s how I found this song. It is every bit as amazing as I remember but shorter. I am going to listen to it all day today and then I’m going to listen to it again.

And I’m going to attach a weighty significance to it to do with the beauty of random wonderful things and how if you don’t lose faith and you wait long enough, something really, really great could happen. You just have to hold on to the tingle and the memory.