You Make My Dreams Come True by Hall & Oates on Grooveshark
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YOU MAKE MY DREAMS COME TRUE by Hall and Oates
This is the song I have listened to the most while working on my computer. In 2007-2008, I played this song at least 40 times on YouTube (choosing the video of someone’s handmade montage of all the romantic moments between Meredith and McDreamy on the t.v. show Grey’s Anatomy) on my headphones in the Umass Library computer lab. This song has an optimistic, “getting things done” feeling. Though the lyrics are positive and up-beat, the feeling equally comes from the tempo, a sort of vintage 80′s shuffle. Listening to it now, it seems very paired down, there really isn’t much to talk about. I’m always amazed by Velvet Underground songs and Johnny Cash, how a humble combination of sounds so effortlessly funnels together to create a sensation, in this case a sort of montage-y one of progress (haven’t we seen this song put to montage many times in movies? usually when two characters are becoming friends…. man and woman, man and man, man and young man, man and old man, or when a woman is slowly putting her life together one step at a time…) This song transmits something true, something not of nature, but of humans pleasing humans by praising humans.
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Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the book Pee On Water, a collection of stories from Publishing Genius Press. Her work has been included in, or forthcoming in McSweeney’s, New York Tyrant, American Short Fiction, and others. She lives in Northampton, Mass., teaching creative writing and painting commission portraits of babies and basketball players.