Lift Off.

I think we all listen for the same thing: that song and that perfect moment of lift off that happens in just one tune in a thousand. The song that builds and builds until the wheels take off and you're flying. You forget where you are and what you're doing. It's that song that lives a couple of inches off the ground.

I can think of a few of them. Sinead O'Connor's Troy gets me there every time. Prince's The Beautiful Ones drives off the road at the halfway point and goes to another place entirely. Where The Streets Have No Name always seems to me to be the one U2 song that couldn't possibly have come from just 4 guys and a recording studio. Sister Morphine. Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want (which does it in an astonishingly short song.) Tom Waits' On The Nickel. Joni Mitchell's River. All of them.

I want to add another song to that list then. Heroes. No surprise, I guess but here's a song that gets there and makes it look easy. I'm stealing from someone else's observation at this point (and I wish I could credit or link you to the person who wrote this, but I can't remember) but they had this to say: Heroes is a song that, for probably less than a minute and close to the conclusion, becomes one of the biggest songs ever created. You know the part that I mean. There's a turning point in the song where it up-shifts from being a great David Bowie tune to being an epic life-or-death arena-rattling number. Everything is moving and everything is clicking. Listening to it, I always know that it's coming and I listen carefully. Still, I can never put my finger on just where it happens.

Those are the songs that I listen for.

[On a sidenote, Under Pressure just about gets there also. Pretty freakin' close.]