Originally published in The Clifton Courier, March 14, 2018

There are some songs you can’t fully appreciate until you’ve heard them on a dance floor.

Songs don’t become cemented as personal classics from being over-played on the radio. You need to form a personal connection to them.

There needs to be something that animates them in a way that transforms them from a collection of sounds into an anthem that lights a fire within your soul.

You hear other people rave about these songs, but you just don’t get it. It’s not as if you don’t like them. You might even sing along with them in the car. But it’s not until you’ve heard them at an event where someone has taken off their shirt and attempted to waterslide along a wooden floor on their belly in puddles of spilled beer and obscenely-potent mojito mix that they really make sense.

To illustrate my point, I’ve compiled a list of songs I didn’t truly appreciate until I heard them on a dance floor:

Take Me Home, Country Roads – John Denver

You’ve heard it on the radio enough to know the general gist of the words. But it’s only years later on your mate’s sticky lounge room floor when you’re shouting the lyrics that this tune truly kicks you in the metaphorical guts.

You’ve moved on from that little house on the edge of town and are in a new world with traffic lights and water that doesn’t corrode pipes. You’ll never forget where you came from. Suddenly, you’re thinking of that New England highway turnoff. Are you crying? Maybe.

Boys From The Bush – Lee Kernaghan

You’ve heard this a lot. It’s on your Drinking With Dad playlist. Heck, you may have even jogged to it a few times. But it’s not until you loudly proclaim you’ve been “droving caaaaaattle” after you’ve kicked off your shoes and the party has dwindled down to your closest and/or drunkest allies that the spirit of piling in the ute on a Saturday night really hits you.

5, 6, 7, 8 – Steps

If you’re aged between 25 and 30 and you were educated within these acres of opportunity, chances are you’ve probably heard this one. But even if you weren’t herded into a classroom each morning for line dancing drills, you’ve probably heard it on the radio.

Back in the day, that initial strike of the fiddle signified forced group exercise, but now it heralds an explosion of nostalgia-fuelled ecstasy.

Not as overdone as The Nutbush or The Time Warp, this is a novel trip back to the group dancing phase from the past that you actually want to take. As you fumble through the moves your fuzzy brain struggles to recall, you’re taken back to a time when life was good and your only stress was convincing your parents to let you go to the pool.

Outback Club – Lee Kernaghan

Another banger from the bloke in the black hat, this one is more of a rallying cry than his aforementioned party anthem. If you can ignore the cringey part about the female member of said Outback Club being the “kinda woman any man’d be proud of”, it’s extremely unifying.

It’s the kind of song you put your shoes back on for, squeezing back into a pair of heavy-heeled clodhoppers so you can stomp obnoxiously to the beat. This is best accompanied by purposeful, powerful clapping and screaming the lyrics to the face of the nearest person.

Party in the USA – Miley Cyrus 

You hear it on the radio and write it off as another piece of soulless trash. But then it comes on when you’re in a dance circle with your favourite people and you realise just how wrong you were.

It’s upbeat. The lyrics are easily punctuated with coordinated movements (see: “I put my haaaaaands up”). And there’s a fabulous, drawn-out “yeah” that is pretty much begging for you to scream it with everything you have inside you. It’s like a joyful exorcism.

Chicken Fried – Zac Brown Band

You didn’t know the lyrics before and you probably never will, but the words you did pick up (“chicken fried”, “night”, “just right”, “radio oooooon”) are somehow etched into your soul now. If you’re like me and didn’t grow up in a Garth Brooks household (country music was strictly Lee and Slim) you’re used to mumbling your way through country bangers. This one is probably one of the easiest tunes to pretend you know and even though you know the people you’re with know you don’t know the words, you also know they don’t care – they’ll dance with you anyway. These are your people.