It’s only recently that I’ve started listening to radio regularly again, which has a lot to do with traveling and driving here and there, and less with any sort of grand plan I’d had. But as this old habit has returned, it did make me realize how living in an iPod world has made it much more rare to hear new songs (well, beyond this blog and others), but moreover, how this particular listening lifestyle robs us of the surprise of stumbling upon a tune with a few years on it.

Now anyone with an iPod has encountered the occasional “I own this?” or “What the heck is this?” moment, but I’d argue that these can’t be categorized as true surprises. After all, we’re the one who’s loaded our entire music library (or some percentage) onto the device, so our listening experience is entirely self-edited and/or self-selected even if our memory fails us now and then.

Which brings me to Soul Asylum‘s “Runaway Train.” Though I own both the CD single and Grave Dancers Union, the band’s 1992 multiplatinum album featuring the song, I can say with great certainty that I haven’t taken either off the shelf for a solid decade, if not longer. But when “Runaway Train” popped up on the radio the other day, it felt really good. For all the knocks against narrow-minded programmers and tightly controlled playlists (even Sirius XM isn’t free of repetition), radio remains a great vehicle for both rediscovering former favorites and reminding us how the intervening years can turn a song we once cared little for into one we’re glad to have heard again. Turning control over to someone else occasionally isn’t such a bad thing (and yes, I know the same can hold true of web radio).

Returning to “Runaway Train,” the song stopped at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 28, 1993, where it stayed for three weeks. It also spent three weeks at #3 on the Rock chart, and won the Grammy for Best Rock Song. Now I’m not sure watching the “Runaway Train” video will elicit happy memories, if only because its “music video as PSA” treatment is as troubling/heartbreaking now as it was back then:

Soul Asylum visited my neck of the woods last Saturday, the headlining talent for the Landshark Lager Oyster Festival in Chicago. I wouldn’t have gone had I’d been in town (neither fan of beer nor oyster), but it’s good to know that some trains keep rolling on.

Purchase Soul Asylum – “Runaway Train” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.