Recently my wife mentioned the song Knock Three Times by Tony Orlando & Dawn in the course of a benign conversation. That comment jarred me, because I remembered the song from 1970, and I realized I had not heard it ever again since those years. So I went to YouTube and found this link:
This song was a hit song in my youth in Germany. I was 14 years old in 1970 and I didn’t know any English yet. I had just started learning first year English in school at that age. It was my third language. A lot of popular songs on the radio in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s were English (Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc.) and American. So we heard the songs all the time, we liked them, but we didn’t understand the lyrics. Listen to a popular song in a language you don’t know (like some of Andrea Bocelli if you don’t know Italian) and you will understand what I mean. You can enjoy a song, you can like a song, you can hum the melody, without ever knowing what it says.
So it was with me and Knock Three Times. I just listened to it now, more than 50 years later, for the first time, and I magically understood the words. It now has a whole new meaning.
This happened to me over the years from time to time, when I’d hear an old hit for the first time. Another recent such experience was with Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks:
This came out in the summer of 1974. By then I was in my 4th year of school English and I probably knew some of the words, like “we had joy, we had fun” but I definitely, positively didn’t understand the part with the starfish on the beach.
We had joy, we had funWe had seasons in the sunBut the stars we could reachWere just starfish on the beach
I remember loving that song, it had such a good beat, and it really personified summer for me in my youth. But when I recently listened to the words for the first time, I was sad and melancholy due to its message, but I also chuckled because the starfish chorus seemed kind of hokey to me.
It is definitely a very unique experience to listen to a trusty old song from your youth and understand the words for the first time 50 years later.