>>two books I ordered last year - one called Your Brain on Music, the other The Singing Neanderthals<<
Those sound quite interesting, so I'll check them out.
My tastes in music are rather eclectic and non-focused: ranging from Andalusian flamenco to Zydeco blues. Mostly I listen to music on the radio, and only remember bits and pieces of it. This leads to considerable "song fragment buildup", a term I picked up from Garrison Keillor. It feels like my subconscious is always straining to resolve an unfinished measure, like when you shut off your car while the windshield wipers are on and they stop in mid-stroke. Or like the agony of Han Solo, when Jabba the Hut froze him into a block of carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back.
Thanks to Google and YouTube, I finally started a project to resolve these tensions. Whenever a song fragment bubbles out of my subconscious (often from the Sixties), I write down the few words I remember and start searching on Google. If I can pin down the song, I can often find a clip of the original performance on YouTube.
I add each successful find to a spreadsheet, so I can keep a permanent record of all these half-forgotten songs. It's sort of like defragging my brain, and it seems to be working.
Pinning some of these down is awfully tough. Here is one where I had the tune and the rhythm, but not the words. I finally nailed it while listening to a documentary on Joni Mitchell. It turns out that one of her big inspirations was a singer named Annie Ross, who sang in a style called "vocalese"...
Annie Ross - Twisted (1959)
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