in the common hours

Best of 2007, Part IV: Music

My mother is a great music lover, and growing up we were in awe that she knew the words to any song we named. It took me a long time to realize the only titles we knew were her favorites. I played her albums endlessly, especially the Broadway musicals and one particular Jerry Vale album. How did she resist the temptation to hide or destroy that album, which usually led to my singing "Man of La Mancha" or "The Shadow of Your Smile" in the dining room with an earnest and extremely off-key voice?

Eventually I noticed though that among all the Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and great Irish groups, there wasn't one Beatles album. Her music collecting ended abruptly with motherhood, and didn't really start again until we were all grown.

Music was so central to my relationships and memories---screaming Ethridge's "Somebody Bring  Me Some Water"  in a library study room with friends in college, celebrating our first Valentine's day at a Paul Simon concert in '91, dancing to "I Will Survive," and singing along while someone strummed "Closer to Fine" on a guitar-- that I was sure motherhood would never have that affect on me.

And yet I struggled to name even five songs in our annual best lists those first few years of Aidan's life.

This year I had fifty in my letter to Mary Alice and Angie (I was kinder to my siblings and limited myself to ten). How did that happen? Probably because our boys are a bit older now, because of roadtrips in Bri's pickup with Sirius playing, because of Mary Alice, who sends recommendations as well as CD mixes, and because we accidentally signed up for Yahoo Unlimited (long story), which is not an expense we will renew but does allow you to listen to any CD in full as many times as you want. I'll miss it when it ends.

Nonetheless, Aidan might someday scan our CD collection and make the same conclusion I did about my mother. Money priorities are different now, while a 99 cent download gets more playtime on the computer than any CD on the stereo anyway. And, with a symphony of two little boys playing most of the day, silence has become a rare and great pleasure.

Songs I obsessed about/overplayed in 2007:

1. "Long Way Round" by Stereophonics
2. "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" by Stars (ignore the first 3 seconds, and make sure it isn't the remix); "I'm not sorry I met you/I'm not sorry it's over/I'm not sorry there's nothing to say"
3. "See the World" by Gomez
4. "The Story" by Brandi Carlile. I loved the whole CD, such a rarity.
5. "More Than This" by Peter Gabriel
6. "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter
7. "Paperweight" by Schuyler Fisk & Joshua Radin ("Last Kiss" also a GREAT soundtrack); "Every word you say/I think I should write down/don't want to forget/come daylight"
8. "Secret Sun" by Alex Heffes
9. "Naked as We Came" by Iron & Wine
10. "The Part Where You Let Go" by Hem

and even though it was new to no one but me, "Late for the Sky" by Jackson Browne is now a permanent favorite.

Honorable mentions: "Right Moves" by Josh Ritter; "Come Undone" by Robbie Williams; "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" by Spoon; "Let Me Go Easy" by Indigo Girls; "New Slang" by the Shins; "Are You Alright" by Lucinda Williams; "Last Request" by Paolo Nutini; "I Will Follow You into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie; "Simple as It Should Be" by Tristan Prettyman

Okay, I'll stop. Some are probably old to many of you, some probably got overplayed on the radio. For me, they were companions while writing in the office, working around the house, or driving to Texas/Colorado/Arizona this year.

Best of 2007, Part V: Moments (and the final one, alleluia) coming next week...

Late for the Sky

A while back Mary Alice and I exchanged a list of songs that fit some unique form of favorites---either songs we wished we could sing or songs for the soundtrack of our life. That sort of thing. MA is 100x more aware of new music and all trends than I am. Among the many reasons I'm grateful for her friendship are the songs she has introduced to me.

I remember driving around LA with her when she first played Dar Williams' "When I Was a Boy" for me. Sometimes I need to hear a song many times before it can find its way into my thick skull. And then there are those songs, like "When I Was a Boy" or "Mercy Now" or "Reason Why" that just have immediate impact. And MA has a gift for finding them.

I knew most of the songs on MA's list, but she also listed "Late for the Sky" by Jackson Browne, which I didn't recognize. I ended up downloading it and fell in love with it. Became obsessed with it. So many good lines, lines of hope and even more of despair and disillusionment:

“How long have I been sleeping? / How long have I been drifting alone through the night?”

The one cure I've found for my peculiar form of OCD: Google. I googled Late for the Sky. I expected to find only lyrics or downloads. Instead I found Paste, and an article on Jackson Browne from 2003 that captured exactly what was haunting me about Late for the Sky. I had never heard of Paste Magazine (no big surprise there---it started in 2002, the year Aidan was born and I lost touch with the world), but twice it's made the Chicago Tribune's list of the best magazines. It's tagline: Signs of Life in Music, Film & Culture. And each issue comes with a sampler CD or DVD of short films, etc.

And, inspired no doubt by Radiohead's latest experiment, for the next two weeks, Paste is letting subscribers pay what they want for a year's subscription. Now that I've just discovered them, I hope that doesn't put them out of business.

Finally, while searching Late for the Sky, I found this excerpt from Bruce Springsteen's speech at Jackson Browne's induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. If, like me, you only associate Jackson Browne with tunes like "Somebody's Baby", listen to the entire Late for the Sky album. I love how Springsteen describes it here:

"Listen to the chord changes of 'Rock Me On the Water' and 'Before the Deluge,' it's gospel through and through. Now I always thought that... our job here on earth, the way we regain our divinity, our sacredness, and our general good-standing is by reconstructing love and creating love out of the broken pieces that we've been given. That's all we have of human promise. That's the way we prove ourselves in the eyes of God and facilitate our own redemption. Now, to me Jackson Browne's work was always the sound of that reconstruction."