What is ear candy? You know it, when you hear it - and it's not Chinese Democracy by Guns N' Roses. I get on kicks where something sticks in my ear and that's all I listen to. Ear candy is addicting and I've spent a lifetime trying to escape the rush of hearing a great song for the first time, but I really love the rush.

What did I just hear? What was that? Who was that? I need to own it and rap my head around it.

It's more of an emotional than an intellectual connection, but I would argue music can translate feelings and mood far better than the great American novel or the latest Hollywood romance. (Why do you think movies strive so hard to have the right soundtrack?) There are certain songs and artists that remind me of moments in my life, certain songs remind me of friends and other songs remind me of women I loved and lost.

A high school girlfriend was always searching for The Carpenters on the radio. Amazingly, she would find them on the FM dial and I would be shocked once again at her tenacity to find the freakin' Carpenters. It reminded me of someone divining water by painstakingly moving the radio knob a little bit to the left and then a little bit to the right.

A girlfriend in college loved "Ghost In You" by The Psychedelic Furs, which I prominently featured on her mix tape. That tape got a lot of play not only by my college girlfriend, but by her sisters, until it unraveled like our relationship.

I lived with a woman for a number of years and I've always made a connection between Camper Van Beethoven's "Eye of Fatima Pt. I" and our failed relationship. (Failure seems to be a theme in these mini-narratives of love lost.)

There was a party at my house, which is the way many tales of love or unrequited love begin. Unbeknown to me, a woman I had unsuccessfully dated in college was a good friend of one of my new roommates and had been invited to the soiree. Seeing me in human form, and not as a one-dimensional picture on her emotional dartboard, set off a nuclear reaction that enraged her enough to make a concerted effort to inform everyone at the party that I was a degenerate scumbag. (I later found out that in college she had given a handjob to my new roommate using Kraft mayonnaise as a lubricant - you can't make this stuff up.)  Every time I turned around, she had someone else cornered to hear her anti-Sheridan diatribe. I dated her for three weeks and this party had turned into a very uncomfortable affair. I had stopped dating Ms. Mayo to date "The Ghost In You" girl and I'll stand by that decision to the day I die.

Seeking relief, from the assassination of my good character, I cued up a little Camper Van and I slowly realized that my future girlfriend liked the same song. How many other places in Massachusetts was I going to meet a woman who dug "Eye of Fatima Pt. I" by Camper Van Beethoven? As the song started to build, our friend Matty Ha Ha started dancing, leaping and moving his vanilla white ass to the music:

He's got the Eye of Fatima on the wall of his room
Two bottles of tequila, three cats and a broom
He's got an 18-year-old angel and she's all dressed in black
He's got 15 nickels of cocaine tied up in a sack
And this here's a government experiment and we're driving like Hell
To give some cowboys some Acid and to stay in motels

If I never had played this Camper Van song, would there have been a connection? I'd like to think so, because I don't believe we decided to live together to share our cd collection, but if I had a been fan of Slayer ... you get the point.

It's all about the ear candy.

Camper Van Beethoven