Yay for a town full of happy people, first of all. The Cardinals have won the world series, and for the first time all day people aren’t honking their horns in frustration. People are out on their lawns banging pots and pans; fireworks are going off; New Year’s Eve has spontaneously broken out. I wish this happened every Friday.

So: when I was a college man, 11 long years ago, the local alternative station (which is still somehow the alternative station, even though it sounds an awful lot like the metal station) was very fond of a They Might Be Giants song called “Sensurround.” In the days when an “alternative” station was an especially strange idea and everyone involved was just shooting for a college station with no college, They Might Be Giants were like the station’s mascots; they had a multi-stage festival or two every summer, and They Might Be Giants played fully half of these fests for the first five or six years of the station’s existence. Today’s version of the same station would not allow them to work the concession stand at the venue.

In 1995, though, any new TMBG single was automatically in heavy rotation, even if that single (like “Sensurround”) was for some reason on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: the Movie Original Soundtrack. It was a fun song; even though they played it often, I always sort of stopped what I was doing to hum along for a verse or two. I had to enjoy it while I could, because I sure as hell was not buying friggin’ Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: the Movie Original Soundtrack. Not for one song. (Look what the iPod has removed from your list of problems. When you see an iPod on the street, you tip your hat to that iPod, young man.)

At the end of the year, when “Sensurround” was on the station’s Best of 1995 year-end countdown, I taped it and many, many other songs off the radio, “taped off the radio” being a pre-web expression meaning “Napster.” Some years later, a digital copy of the song fell off a truck right outside my house, so I got it on disc without being exposed to any of the hazards associated with morphin’. It wasn’t my favorite song of all time– I didn’t strive to live my life by its tenets or anything– but it was an upbeat number that always reminded me of its era and put a grin on my face when I listened to it. It is one of the songs I associate most closely with 1995, which I remember as a particularly excellent year, although in fairness my summer job that year did involve breathing a lot of paint fumes in unventilated rooms for hours at a time.

After having the song in my collection in one form or another for almost 11 years, a few months ago I was doing some idle, directionless surfing when I discovered They Might Be Giants (like everything with more than four fans) had its very own wiki. Like you do with wikis and/or hedge mazes, I began poking around with even less direction until I had no idea where I came from, what I was looking for, or how I got where I was. Then some random thing I saw made me think, “That song ‘Sensurround’ was too enjoyable to have just been dumped on some crappy soundtrack. Did they really never put that on an album? To the search results!”

I looked it up, and it turned out that the song had in fact been released on an EP all those years ago… but not the version I had heard. The Power Rangers version was a slower, less rock recording of the tune; the EP version, the “real” version, was completely different.

After 11 years of listening to this song and liking it, I discovered out of the blue one day that I had never actually heard it.

I called a couple friends of mine– “did you know about this??”– and naturally no one else had heard of this Power Rangers thing, and I sounded like I’d replaced my meds with Wild Turkey. Apparently, I was the only person in town listening to the radio that year. Luckily, one of them had the EP on hand and was able to loan it to me. And that was how I got to have the almost impossible experience of discovering a favorite song for the first time all over again. It was like getting a year back for three minutes.