At the piano

I wasn't around for the 1950s and 1960s incarnations of Unchained Melody. I first got to know this song when it was on the soundtrack to Ghost in 1990, and then I adored it, playing the single over and over. And then, apart from the odd times when I heard it on Ghost, if the movie happened to be on TV, I forgot about.

At the end of 2007 I was back living in my home town, we’d just bought a house and we were preparing to hold the family Christmas celebration at our place. My stepfather and I were both enthusiastic about the idea of having a family Christmas carol sing-a-long, and in a roundabout way this prompted my mother to offer her piano as a gift to our new house. I’d learned to play the piano as a child, and still loved playing it whenver I visited my mother’s house, and had long secretly been hoping to be able to take it back to my place. Finally, one November morning, a couple of strong removalists brought the piano into my living room.

My mother brought round two large plastic bags full of sheet music. Some was music I’d played as a child and teenager, a few classical music books, some more modern tunes, and sheet music books from a couple of my favorite bands. Just before I’d stopped playing the piano when I was young, a friend and I had swapped all kinds of sheet music, so there was a pile of interesting stuff that I couldn’t remember ever playing.

One of the songs in this pile was Unchained Melody. It was a reasonably simple version to play, and I picked it up and took it straight to the piano. I could pick out most of the notes straight away, and I soon started singing along to a forgotten favorite song. Now I play it regularly and although it often invokes the sad atmosphere I know from the movie soundtrack version, I still enjoy it.