[MUSIC]
>> Welcome, welcome to the best five minute wine podcast. >> With Thorous Kelly. >> All right, if you'll let me indulge for a moment before streaming, before playlists, back when if you wanted to hear a song, you had to wait for it. I was a kid with a cassette player sitting by the radio with my finger hovering over
their record button, like it was a high stakes operation. Timing was everything. You either caught the song clean or you got the DJ talking over the intro.
“And honestly, that was part of the charm.”
And I didn't just listen to music at home. I'd strapped the cassette player to my bike and ride all over town. No plan, no destination. Just me, the road, and whatever songs I managed to capture that day. Some money in my pocket for mowing lawns or washing cars, that was the freedom.
That was mine. Now fast forward a few years and somehow that same kid ends up as a full-time DJ at a local radio station.
And I still remember one of my first shifts.
They handed me a new album to play brand new, fresh, untouched vinyl. It was face value by Phil Collins. And I played in the air tonight for the first time.
“Man, that wasn't just a song that was an experience.”
The drum break didn't just hit. It changed something. It made me realize music isn't just background music. It's memory. It's emotion.
It sticks with you. And if I'm being honest, that's probably why I end up doing a wine podcast. Wine hits a lot of those same notes. Not just what goes into the glasses where you were, who you were with, what was happening in that moment.
It's a story, which brings me to this one. Let me ask you something. See if you can guess the song before I give it away. So I'm combining my love of music and wine here. This one comes from an artist who knew how to write a hook.
The sticks in your head for decades. The kind of voice you recognize in about half a second. Big sing along's big personality. Here's your first clue. This was the song that gave him his first number one hit.
Not the one people always shout at parties.
Not the one everybody thinks of first. But the one that got their first, here's another little clue and nugget for you. The phrase that the center of the song, it wasn't originally written as some romantic name. It was slang for inexpensive wine, the kind that was often a blend sometimes even with
a little fruit added in. Nothing fancy, just made to be easy drinking. So now you've got the artist, you've got the milestone, you've got the wine connection, maybe got an idea who it is. The song is built around a phrase that sounds like it could be a person, maybe a woman.
Maybe someone a little wild, a little unpredictable. People first heard it, that's exactly what they thought, but it wasn't, not really. It was about that kind of wine, simple, cheap, easy, social. The kind you don't overthink. The kind that shows up does its job and somehow becomes part of a great night anyway.
Here's one more fun detail. The rose in the title, not a person at all, it's a nod to Rose A wine, which makes the whole
“thing even more on the nose, what you know it, and what makes the song so great?”
It doesn't try too hard, it's not pretending to be something it's not, it just shows up, makes you feel good, kind of like the way best wines do it. From recording songs off the radio, to playing them on the air, to sitting here talking
about wine, it's always about chasing that feeling, that moment when something just clicks.
And if you haven't guessed it yet, the song I've been talking about, the one inspired by a nickname for cheap wine, the one that gave him his first number one hit, that would be back to the cold and make me a smile, girl with his last breath all and all right.
