oh girl, I’d be so sorry if you gave me a root canal: the chi-lites
Others have pointed to more obviously dramatic instances of ‘music-changed-my-life-and-made-me-see-the-light,’ the most common type of which would be where the person, despondent, possibly suicidal, hears Huey Lewis and the News and realizes it’s time to pull it all together and go on. William S. Burroughs claimed, in Junky, that he kicked a heroin habit with the help of some Louis Armstrong records. But I can’t think of a higher compliment to a song than what happened to me this morning: I was in a dentist’s chair, peering up at the boxed fluorescent light, with my dentist and dental hygienist leaning over me, doing horrible things to me with their shiny instruments, and I was feeling genuinely grateful to be alive, feeling that feeling associated with both uplifting films about terminal patients and also excellent hallucinogenic drugs or the lord’s spirit, because “Oh Girl” by the Chi-Lites was playing. I am not suggesting that we replace modern anesthetics with smooth seventies soul. But these are good songs.