Redtree Times

“Private Song”– GC Myers, 2006

I’ve shared hundreds of songs here over the past thirteen years — omigod, it’s been that long!?– that I have been writing this blog. Some were new to me and some were favorites of mine. Sometimes I will think I have played a particular song since it means a lot to me and do a search to discover that it somehow has been overlooked, that I have never shared it here.

Such is the case for the song I am sharing today, I’m Not Like Everybody Else from the Kinks. I was positive I had played it here at some point but that is not the case. I mentioned it once, when I was writing about the use of music in TV and film and how I thought this song was used brilliantly to end an episode of The Sopranos. But I never played it here.

It’s a song that certainly speaks to our desire to be uniquely seen, to not be clumped in and labeled along with everyone else. That’s the attraction for me, outside of the fact that I just like its sound. This iconoclastic desire to be seen only as myself is probably the reason I do what I do.

If everybody else is doing it, then I don’t want to do it.

That can sometimes be a valuable asset in art but in real life it doesn’t always work out ideally. There’s generally an aloofness that comes with this attitude, a distance put between yourself and others. It can be off-putting and isolating to some folks, I suppose. 

But it becomes a way of being after awhile and you don’t see things as being or not being like everybody else. You just do what you do and that’s that, whether you or anybody else likes it or not.

The ironic part of this song is that we all want to be unlike everybody else and, as a result, end up being just like everybody else. Maybe the subtitle of this song should be I’m Just Like Everybody Else.

I don’t know. I’m yammering on now and I have work to get to right now. Without further ado, here’s a favorite song from the one and only Kinks– they really are not like everybody else.