"If you want it aaaaaany time, I can get it!"

God, it’s wonderful what you can pull from your subconscious. And how random those pulls can be!

An obscure Paul McCartney number, “Come and Get It,” has been swirling in my head on and off for about three years. Most times, it comes to mind as I’m trying to get into a Spanish-language mindset. In a way, it’s a vestige of a time when I was trying to go to Spain after my junior year of high school and would translate almost every snippet of song in my head. With this song, I had wrestled over whether the lyrics should be translated as, “Si lo quieres, ¡aquí está! Ven y óbtenlo” or, “Si lo quieras” or, “venga y obténgalo.” (I was in the middle of learning the commands and the subjunctive tense.) Because of that constant internal quibbling, it ingrained itself into the mixed tape of my mind, recycling like the end piece of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

But it also reshuffled itself. Because I had recalled a song from the past and attached a different memory to it, I lost where I had originally heard it. Had it been on a late Beatles album? I asked myself, or was Paul’s voice developed enough that it could conceivably come from his solo work? I decided on the latter, and I went on for about a year convinced that it was a Paul McCartney solo number. When I looked through my McCartney songs on iTunes, though, I didn’t find it. Consumed with other things to do, I moved on, content in not knowing its origin for sure and allowing it to float around in my head without a home.

With the confluence of two Beatles forces, however, I have finally found the source. I want to finish the Beatles biography before classes start so that it doesn’t run into the reading requirements for my Jimi Hendrix class. (And every other class, of course.) While I was still reading the book at home, I thought of the great idea to put all the Beatles Anthology recordings onto my computer so I could, in effect, “listen” to the book as I read descriptions of the band’s studio work. Now that I only have 84 pages left, I’ve started to get into their latest work, the things that are covered in Anthology 3. Buried near the end of Anthology 3, to my great surprise, was “Come and Get It,” the old Spanish-practice standby!

Immediately, the old feelings of the song came back. I mean the OLD feelings, before I used it to debate the subjunctive tense in my head. This song, and an early version of “The End,” brought back memories of me acting out the lyrics and moving in time with the melody. I would point at an imaginary person, maybe someone who really wanted a candy bar or my Game Boy, and curl my finger as I sing, “If you want it, heeeeere it is! Come and get it.” Or I would take the place of Ringo and play his drum solo, which is regrettably overshadowed by electric guitar in the Anthology version. Of course, all that would happen in the privacy of either my own room or a spare room in Grandma Farris’s house in South Bend.

(The latter room figures prominently in recollections of “The End.” I would lie down on the guest bed, slowly rise up as the final crescendo built, and stand up on the bed just in time to fall dramatically back down once the final piano chord struck. Either that, or I would slowly fall off the edge, clutching the covers in fake desperation and hitting the floor in time with the piano.)

All these memories coming back in two little songs simply overwhelmed me. The events of those last two paragraphs came flashing back to me in five short seconds of condensed nostalgia, and the whole experience has plastered a smile to my face. The feeling is even better than when I listened to "Closing Time" on my last walk in London. This is wonderful!

Question, for those of you willing to answer: Has any song brought back that intense nostalgia in you? A song that you hadn’t heard in A LONG TIME but that conjured up the same feeling it did 10 years ago? Respond with a “tangent.”

[P.S.: A good history of the song is here. Paul wrote it and played all the instruments for the "Beatles" version, but he wrote it for a movie and another band in the Apple Records family. So really, it's neither a Beatles song nor a solo McCartney song. Paul had simply recorded it before a day's Abbey Road session.]