Greatest Albums of All Time

A Song I Somehow Knew

By Kyle J. Hayes

I have never watched The Sound of Music, not once, not as a child, not as an adult.

It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t some grand statement. It was instinct. Something in me recoiled at the idea of turning Nazi Germany into a backdrop for a musical, of wrapping history in song and dance, of softening something that should never be softened. And so, I let it pass me by without ever making a conscious decision.

And yet—when I listened to the soundtrack, something happened.

The music felt familiar—unsettlingly so—like a half-remembered dream or the echo of a childhood long forgotten. Before I even realized it, the words were forming on my lips, the melodies weaving through my mind, lifting me out of the present and dropping me somewhere else entirely.

Sunday nights. The television screen glows softly in a dimly lit living room. The Wonderful World of Disney plays, filling the air with magic and nostalgia, with the kind of wonder that only children believe will last forever. I was there again, small, enchanted, held in the arms of a time that no longer exists.

But how?

How did these songs belong to me when I had never claimed them? Was it the feelings they carried, the way music holds onto emotion long after the memory fades? Or was it something more straightforward and technical—the fact that these songs had been drilled into us in elementary school, taught to children in music class as if they were as foundational as the alphabet?

I don’t know, and I may never know. But what I do know is this: The Sound of Music belongs on the list.

There are albums that change the world and albums that settle into it, shaping the fabric of collective memory so seamlessly that they feel like they have always been there. This one does both. It has found a way to exist beyond the film, beyond the stage, beyond history itself. It is not just music; it is cultural inheritance, passed down through generations and woven into the lives of people who never even sought it out.

And that is what makes it great.

So long, farewell,

Auf Wiederseh’n, goodbye.