Saving a song

The current example is "Fly" by Low:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Enxzh-O9Y

In my student days we had a list of CDs we were only allowed to listen to once a week in case we ruined them for ourselves, from memory this included

Soft Machine Volumes 1 & 2
Kraftwerk 1
Superfly
GYBE - f#a#oo
Aphex Twin Come To Daddy EP
Probably Forever Changes and Barrett and a few more

Not sure if it worked as we were well on our way to moving on to other stuff by that point anyway. I do still like all of those, but haven't listened to any of them obsessively since then.

Once you've ruined a song, is it ruined forever? or does an adequate rest period bring it back to life?

I totally do this, for both songs and albums. I avoid listening too much, so I don’t “wear them out.”

Once you've ruined a song, is it ruined forever?

By the way the same thing happened to me with black olives. I liked them in the beginning, ate too many, could not smell olives for more than ten years and now love calamata olives even more than ever.

I can never hear a song like “Like a Rolling Stone” with fresh ears, even though it’s a terrific song and I’m a huge Dylan fan. Hearing it 10,000,000,000 times over the years has that effect.

do not listen to it for 20 years and we talk about it again. "like a rolling stone" is a good example. it still gives me the goosebumps but i have tried to avoid it as often as possible.

Yep. My most played song on iTunes has 58 plays, and I've had the same library for about 6 years. Also, there's too much great music to listen to any one song too much.

My girlfriend is the polar opposite; if she finds a song she likes she has it on endless repeat. I think she broke the play counter on Delicate by Taylor Swift.

I've never done this, though it has occurred to me sometimes that I am ruining a particular song or album for myself. I don't really care though, if I enjoy it now I should listen to it, I don't know what I'll like in the future.

Once you've ruined a song, is it ruined forever? or does an adequate rest period bring it back to life?
― enochroot, Thursday, October 11, 2018 7:17 AM (one hour ago)

I can say absolutely for sure that you can get go back with fresh ears. It takes a lot of time and immersing yourself into something completely different. But you can do it.

The reason why this works is that the most important feature of the brain is that it can forget. A brain which cannot forget is soon full and won't memorise anything anymore.

Very annoying when you're saving a song and then it comes on in a cafe or – worse – in the background in some TV show. Just a waste of an already depleted resource.

My experience of listening to "dead" songs after long periods without (nowadays I have gaps of 25 years for some songs) is that the first listen is interesting (from "I thought I had stored every detail but the tone here is something I might not have appreciated on my early 90s stereo" to "I've almost forgotten what happens next") but then the music immediately reverts to its dead state, to be perhaps revived briefly again in the early 2040s and then no more.