Berlin, Late Night

Berlin. Late night parties where Swiss flamenco guitarists and Canadian violinists and French Brassens fans (and Iranian academics and Syrian guitarists and some Germans and Americans who just really like this sort of thing) in a living room rock out to the pop songs we all grew up with and sing along on each other's musical styles and improvise the blues. Oh, and Metallica.

(Then, later, they started inventing deliberately awkward, literal German translations of popular song lyrics, like "Schlag mich Baby noch einmal" for Britney Spears' "Hit me baby one more time" and "Ich kann dein Held sein, Baby" for "I can be your hero, baby" from that Enrique Iglesias song.)

I admit, I started losing interest around the point the party devolved into an apparent attempt to cover every Pink Floyd song ever – but by then anyway it was after 3 a.m. and the mid-summer sky was already almost tinged with blue.

But it was cool to hear the friend from Iran say, "This is how I grew up. We would sit around in Tehran, singing every Pink Floyd song we could."

There's something so astoundingly universal about music, sometimes.