Whither It Depends?

(Image from here.)

Oh hey.  Hey!  Over here.  Yeah, it's me.  Self Help Radio is new this week, after a week off.  I bet you kinda hoped it was gone for good, but no such luck!  Not only are we back, we're back with a really dumb theme: it depends.

What the hell does that mean?  Well, it means songs that talk about depending on people or things, & also songs about not depending on anyone, which, you know, is independence.  See?  Told ya!  A dumb theme.

The reason I'm doing this show is sort of stupid, too, & coincidental.  I was in a neighborhood supermarket some time around the beginning of the year & a customer was trying to get an opinion out of an employee, who didn't seem to feel confident enough about the subject matter, which was yogurt.  I myself was standing somewhat near to them, as in this supermarket, the place where the tofu & the tempeh is is next to the yogurt & the butter.  I was buying tofu.  I pretended to browse so I could eavesdrop.

The customer was my age or a little older & he seemed to need to know something about the yogurt in relation to what I believe was a recent development of lactose intolerance.  This he did not come out & say, so perhaps that explained the employee's hesitation to express a solid opinion one way or another, but this manifested in many rounds of a conversation like this:

Customer (holding up a small container of yogurt): "Is this a brand you think is good?"
Employee: "It depends."
Customer: "On what?"
Employee: "On your own preference."

The customer would then pick another brand & ask a similar question, often after poring over the little container.  The employee would wait patiently, & then be noncommittal all over again.

At some point the employee wandered away & (a person who I assumed was) the customer's spouse showed up & asked the customer, "Which one did he think was good?"  The customer said, "I think he liked this one best."

I was amazed.  I was convinced he'd be enraged!  But nope.  I thought, "I need to answer more questions with 'it depends'!"  People mainly want you to validate their own decisions, it seems.

& then of course I thought it might be a good show.  So I came home & started collecting songs.

Will it be a good show?  Let's not press our luck.  Let's just listen tomorrow at noon at Self Help Radio dot net.  I hope you'll listen.  I'm depending on it.