Day 05 - A Song that Reminds You of Someone

This entry a part of the 30 Day Song Challenge

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No Pressure Over Cappuccino
Alanis Morissette
MTV Unplugged [Live]
(Released November 1999)

Just one song to remind me of someone? That’s pretty difficult considering there’s a song I associate with everyone I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to meet — and not meet, if we’re talking about friends from the WWW. But since this is a music challenge, I guess it’s fitting to go back to where it all started, this personal love for music.

Well it was my dad who introduced me to the music genres. When I think about my childhood nights and weekends I remember hearing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, The Beatles, Sade, Kenny G, Tracy Chapman, Eagles, etc. playing on the stereo. I would browse thru his music collection but there wasn’t anything that really appealed to me. (Though many years later I would develop an appreciation for the music my dad used to play when I was a kid. Acquired taste, I think it’s called.)

The time I really paid attention to music was when I started watching MTV Asia (Channel 23) and Channel V (Channel 27) on free TV (we didn’t have cable then). This was in the mid-nineties. And it was also around this time that I had the privilege of meeting *this* high school classmate, who was so into music like you have no idea. I would have called her an aficionado if I knew what the word meant when I was 12.

She listened to all sorts of music, from Blur to Tina Arena, from Kula Shaker to Celine Dion. And she stocked up on what it seemed like every record that came out during the time. She owned a copy of Jewel’s debut album Pieces of You but also made it a point to get the second release in 1997. She got Mariah Carey’s Butterfly the moment it came out. There were two album covers and she had to get both of them. I would bring my collection of song hits (ah, those were the days) to school and we would sing along to our favorite songs and record them on tape. (Yes, I still have the “recordings” with me. I converted them to digital format a few years ago for posterity.)

But of all the artists she listened to, Alanis Morissette was her number one favorite. To say she was a die-hard fan would be an understatement. If I’m not mistaken, it was only Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill that she had a CD copy of; every other album of every other artist was a cassette tape. She knew everything about Alanis and committed her song lyrics to memory. One lazy afternoon I walked up to her and saw her writing what appeared to be poetry in her notebook. She said she was penning the lyrics to this unreleased Alanis Morissette song, No Pressure Over Cappuccino. She’d heard it on the radio once and she described it as Alanis’s most beautiful song. I hadn’t heard of it, of course, but I believed her; the title alone was intriguing enough. This was September 1997.

Then, stuff happens and this friend and I lose contact. Well, for one, we both transferred schools after our first year. I haven’t heard from her since and it’s been close to 15 years.

In November 1999, my dad got me my first Sony Walkman, which I loved dearly but eventually broke in less than a year (it was dad’s fault). The same day I dropped by Odyssey-Festival Supermall to buy the very first cassette tape for this new Walkman. On display was Alanis Morissette’s new record, MTV Unplugged. I was already a fan of Alanis at the time (but not as much today!) so I considered getting the album (I also considered getting The Cranberries’ Bury the Hatchet.). Then I checked the song list and lo and behold, cut #3 was entitled No Pressure Over Cappuccino, the “unreleased” Alanis song my friend had mentioned to me two years ago.

I bought the cassette tape and played it on the way home. My friend was right, this was an incredibly beautiful song. Alanis Morissette is #1 (sometimes #2) on my Last.Fm charts because I have all her albums in my library. I love a lot of her songs but this one, No Pressure Over Cappuccino, is by far the best Alanis song, in my opinion. And yes, it always reminds me of my friend who told me about it.

She’s on Facebook now, it appears. I’ve been searching for her for years but to no avail. But last February another high school friend informed me that she had spotted her there. I ran a search a few days ago and found my way to her profile. I was about to press the “Add as Friend” button but I chickened out. Perhaps she doesn’t even remember this person anymore, anyway.

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