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This Song Ought To Be On Your Halloween Playlist
A spooky song by a pop musical storyteller
If you have or have had kids, you know that Halloween challenged Christmas as their favorite holiday.
(Even though Halloween isn’t an actual holiday — a day off, that is.)
And for good reason. For just one day, you get to pretend to be something you’re not. You get free candy and lots of it. Choosing the best pumpkin in the patch. And smelling it burn on the night of — that aroma takes me back.
Our family usually had a party for the kids every Halloween. I was responsible for the playlist and succumbed to their favorite songs for the occasion, including “Monster Mash,” “Ghostbusters,” “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist, the “Halloween” theme from the movie, and, of course, “Thriller.”
But there was one song that I always wanted that I could not get my hands on. (We didn’t have iTunes back in the 80s!) The only radio station I had ever heard it on was KOMA in Oklahoma City. But I was hundreds of miles from there at my grandpa’s ranch near Durango, Colorado. When I’d spend my summers there, the only music we could get came on at night on AM radio.
The reason has something to do with how radio waves travel through the ionosphere. The amount of ions in it increases and…
