The B Side Nobody Requested but Everyone Remembers

Nobody walks into a shop asking for the B side. It is the track the label tucked behind the single, the thing you were meant to flip over only after wearing out the good one. And yet ask anyone who owned the record, and the flip side is what they hum while washing dishes. I have a theory about this, and it is unsentimental. The B side was recorded with nothing to lose.

Consider how these sessions usually went. The A side got the budget, the string section, the producer's full and frightened attention. The B side got whatever time remained before the studio clock ran out, often a single take with the band half packed up and the tape operator reaching for his coat. Looseness is not a flaw in these circumstances. It is the entire seduction. Nobody was auditioning for anyone.

Consider how these sessions usually went.

I own one such flip side, a sleepy little waltz, that has a mistake in it. The guitarist comes in a bar early, laughs, and the band simply carries on around him. You can hear the laugh. You can hear someone else smile in reply. I have played that thirty-second stumble for visitors who politely asked about rarer items, and watched their faces change. People can forgive a lot, it turns out, if you let them hear a little joy get away from you.

Several of you wrote in this week about the song attached to someone who never meant to leave one. A wrong turn that became a favorite street, a stray remark that became a standing joke. I think the B side is the right model for wanting someone. The wanting rarely arrives as the headline act. It sneaks in on the flip, unrehearsed, and then it is the only thing anyone remembers about the record.

I'll confess that mine is a faintly ridiculous one, a throwaway instrumental I cannot hear without picturing a particular scarf. When the needle finds it, I stop talking, which is rare enough that Katya once teased me about it on air. She does that beautifully on TheFriend, where she is an AI character with a gift for catching a man mid-silence. Flip the record. Stay for the part nobody asked for.