Facebook And The Soundtrack Of My Life

   About a week and a half ago, to celebrate its 10th birthday, Facebook did the service of allowing us to view our individual "Look Back" videos.
   These were one minute vignettes of selected posts and pics that were deemed the most popular, or "viewed", dating back to when we each joined the social media site.
   I was moved by mine. I understand that many of us were and that some of us were even moved to tears.
   None of us saw pictures or posts we'd never seen before, obviously, and yet we were still moved.
   For me, it was the music.
   Yes, music was a big part of it but it was also the juxtaposition of the music and the particular photos that appeared on my video which truly touched me.
   For the most part, they were family-oriented and significant--pictures of our wedding, kids, and both of my parents.
   These pics were already significant to me but combining them with music and streaming them through my consciousness in such a manner seemed to give them that much more significance.
   I guess that's what a soundtrack will do, it will provide that extra aural and emotional context to what you are seeing. How many movies can you think of that are hard to separate from the music that accompanied them? Hard to imagine such movies as Gone With The Wind, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Pink Panther, Jurassic Park, Lawrence of Arabia and Pulp Fiction without the iconic music which accompanied them. One of my all-time favourite scenes from any movie occurs during Jurassic Park, at the moment when the visitors to the island come across dinosaurs for the first time. They are brought, literally, to their knees as the scope of what they are seeing becomes apparent. At this point in the movie, John Williams' music is both soaring and majestic as man comes face-to-face with...well...history. In my mind, an indelible moment is created as much because of the music as for any other reason.
   Without thinking about it too much, we took pictures. For a variety of reasons, we gathered up pictures which had already been taken. If the mood struck us, we said something that other people might have thought was pertinent, important or perhaps humourous. Singly, the significance of all these actions was possibly not obvious to us. String them together, though, and then add music and all this changes somehow.
   So does the music just add emotion or does it bring out the emotion that was already intrinsically there? Does it act somehow in a similar way as alcohol, heightening the emotional intensity of a relationship to a person or event?
   It's almost as if music breaks down whatever subconscious defense mechanism we've deployed to keep ourselves on the even emotional keel which gets us through our days. Throw in a little music, however, and we are emotional in a variety of ways over things which did not seem terribly momentous at the time they actually occurred.
   If you are at all like me, you may have been just a touch creeped out that Facebook was even able to do these videos. I realize that none of the pictures or statuses on my Facebook page are truly private but I was trying hard to imagine that nobody was paying any attention to, or had any vested interest in, them. This seems to not be the case. In an example of marketing at its low-key best, Facebook has wormed its way into our hearts and all it took was adding a little music to the soundtrack of our life. 
  
  
  

Kika In The Bar

   Last weekend, Doralyn and the boys and I headed to Uxbridge, Ontario to stay for a couple of days and help Doralyn's brother, James, celebrate his fiftieth birthday.
   Part of this celebration involved attending the King Henry's Arms pub in Uxbridge and watch James perform along with his band, Fourplay. Fourplay specializes in vintage rock and comprises some very talented performers. The evening itself was billed as James' birthday party.
   As part of the birthday celebration, James' daughter Shakira, aka Kika, and his son, Zoey, got up in front of the audience to play and sing a number. Zoey played the guitar and Kika sang. The song they performed was "The A Team" by Ed Sheeran. If you're not familiar with it (I wasn't) then check it out on You Tube. Their opportunity to showcase their talents came between Fourplay sets. The bar was packed and the crowd had really been rocking, dancing and singing along with the band. When the band stopped, the crowd essentially maintained its boisterousness, completely unaware for the most part that two young performers still had a song to do.


Kika and Zoey in the King Henry's Arms

   In spite of all the noise and lack of attention, Zoey began to play and Kika began to sing. They could barely be heard. I was not surprised, given the nature of small-town bars, that people would just continue on in party mode, in between sets of a rock band. I was however very annoyed at the total lack of respect for the two performers who were trying to do a special song for their Dad on his birthday. I was about thirty seconds away from raising my own voice above the din and telling people to shut up when the reason for this blog post happened.
   Kika's voice took over.
   Her singing got a little louder and, all of the sudden, its pitch and timbre rose above the general cacophony and stopped people. Without any outward admonition that I could hear being directed at it, the crowd ceased its rowdiness and listened to the song being sung. The quieter they got, the more forcefully the song took over.  I found this very gratifying and, honestly, quite magical.
   You need to understand that Kika is a 13 year-old girl. She is tall and willowy and you can imagine that at some point in the not-too-distant future she will be causing havoc in the hearts of young boys. But on a Saturday night in a downstairs bar in Uxbridge, Ontario she was just a mere slip of a girl standing up to a crowd of celebratory, partying drinkers and, in an ephemeral moment, stopping them in their tracks.     
  
  

Carsongs

   There are songs I sing that I only sing in the car. I spend a lot of time in my car and, for much of that time, am alone. This gives me the perfect opportunity to break into song.
   I have been singing essentially the same songs for years now. They are songs that, for a lack of a better term, have always struck a chord with me. Many are songs from old albums my parents used to play. A couple of them are folk songs from a live Harry Belafonte album, "Hene ma tov" and "La Bamba". Ironically, one is an Israeli song and the other has whole sections in Spanish, the translations of which I have never actually known but they are both melodic and beautiful and I am happy to sing them anyway.

   Harry Chapin plays a prominent part in my car songbook. "Cats in the Cradle" and "Taxi" (yes, the whole thing--minus the high part) get a lot of play. I also do a specialty version of "Taxi" in high speed, it takes only about a minute and 45 seconds and is good for a giggle, although only one other human has ever heard it and he is with the angels as we speak.
   Various songs from the original album version of "Jesus Christ, Superstar" get frequent airplay, my favourite is "Hosanna" (I sound like Jesus and I sound like Caiphas...)
   There are several songs I like to think of as perfect songs. Their perfection has something to do with their message, their poetry and their symmetry. Included in this particular list of car songs is Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy", Traffic's "John Barleycorn", Paul Simon's "Duncan" and Paul Stookey's "The Wedding Song (There is Love)".
   Lastly, there are my songs, songs I've made up, some serious, some pretty light-hearted and some downright silly. Some I wrote when I was a teenager and then on into my early twenties, mostly about girls and work and many of them, to coin a phrase, angst-driven. After I discovered that my Mum's remains were interred in common ground at Mt. Pleasant cemetery, I ended up writing a song called "The Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues". I wrote this simply while driving around, without having to put a lot of deep thought into it. Generally, this is when the best songs happen. At the other end of the spectrum, I wrote a song about a guy whose girlfriend won't have sex with him because, as it turns out, she's in love with a tennis player. To make matters even worse for the young man, the tennis player turns out to be Martina Navratilova. Probably the crowning achievement of my car songwriting career has been a take-off on Puccini's great aria from "Turandot"--Nessun Dorma. In my version, the title becomes "I Knew Norma".

   Unfortunately, no one has heard or will likely ever hear any of these self-written car songs. The glory of singing in the car is the anonymity and relative privacy. I do tend to turn down the volume a touch at stoplights and in slow-moving traffic. Once I'm back up to speed, though, all bets are off.
   So if you see me in traffic someday and it looks like I'm talking to a passenger in a very exaggerated and demonstrative sort of way and you look and you notice that there is no passenger...well, that's just me and my car songs!
  
  

Nessun Dorma (just a little bit of opera...)

Placido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti
 

   I am not a huge opera fan. I can only actually name probably four or five of them. A few years ago, though, I accidentally ended up watching a PBS special in which "The Three Tenors" sang "Nessun Dorma", an aria from an opera called "Turandot", by Giacomo Puccini. The Three Tenors were comprised of Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. An aria is normally sung by one person but for this performance each of the tenors sang portions of it.

Giacomo Puccini

   By the time the song was over, I had chills running up and down my spine and you could tell that it had had the same effect on the audience. I missed the actual title of the aria and had to investigate further to find out what it was called. Since then I have heard many versions of Nessun Dorma by a wide variety of performers, both male and female. I have included the Three Tenors version here, not because its version is anymore superior to another but simply because, with one viewing, you will see three extraordinary musical talents.
   I have decided to include both the Italian words to the opera as well as their English translation below:

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza.
guardi le stelle
che tremano d'amore
e di speranza.
Mal il mio mistero e chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun sappra!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo diro
quando la luce splendera!
Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio
che to ma fia!
(Il nome suo nessun sapra!...
e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)
Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate stelle!
Tramontate stelle!
All'aba vincero!
Vincero, vincero!

Nobody shall sleep!...
Nobody shall sleep!
Even you, o Princess,
In your cold room, watch the stars,
that tremble with love and with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me,
my name no one shall know...
No!...No!...
On your mouth I will tell it when the light shines.
And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!...
(No one will know his name and we must, alas, die.)
Vanish, o night!
Set, stars! Set, stars!
At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!

   If there had been any hint that opera was something I might have had the slightest interest in probably it was when I was a kid and listened to Mario Lanza singing on the soundtrack album for the movie "The Student Prince". This was an album I would play over and over and much of it was simply due to Lanza's voice, it was like nothing I'd ever heard before. My favourite song on the album was "Drink, Drink, Drink", kind of a boisterous drinking/love song and his voice was magnificent, towering over the men's chorus.
   Until running into the Three Tenors on PBS, however, whatever interest I might have had in opera lay extremely dormant.
   The human vocal cords can be an utterly astonishing thing. Nowhere is this demonstrated as clearly as when you listen to the highly-trained operatic voice. Whether you are an opera fan or not, it is impossible to not be impressed. In researching this one aria alone I ran into the likes of José Cura, Jussi Bjorling and Giuseppe di Stefano, all who have rendered it amazingly. As a further example of the combined power of the voice and this one piece of music you need look no further than Paul Potts' performance of it on "Britain's Got Talent" a few years back. The reaction of both the judges and the audience is testament to the power of opera and this one aria in particular. I can only imagine that most of the people there that evening had barely a working knowledge of opera and yet all were moved.
   I would invite you to test the operatic waters, as it were, when you have the time. These days musical downloads and YouTube, it is possible to do this almost instantaneously. There is wonderfully moving music out there, just waiting for you to experience it.
  

Songs You Should Probably Hear At Least Once

   There is a lot of wonderful music out there, you hear it on the radio every day. If your my age, you've been hearing it on the radio for about fifty years now. What I've learned over the years, though, is that the music you hear on the radio is not always the best music there is out there, even by the the same artist.
   I find this very frustrating to talk to people who have an opinion on an artist only based on what they've heard on the radio. To help relieve my frustration a little in this regard, I'm going to post some of my favourite songs you probably haven't heard on the radio.

   The first one is Leonard Cohen's "The Sisters of Mercy". I was kind of torn between this and "Dress Rehearsal Rag" but I was after a slightly lighter tone so chose the former. I saw Cohen perform this song live here in London many years ago and he told a little story about how it came to be. Apparently he was wandering frigid Edmonton after a concert one wintery evening and somehow got invited in out of the cold by a couple of young women. He ended up spending an "unfortunately chaste" night at the girls' place and ended up writing this song as a result, if my faltering memory serves.
   Melanie Safka has always been one of my favourite artists, ever since "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain). It always bothered me that one of her most popular songs of all time was "Brand New Key". It certainly is a catchy little song but in her overall body of work there is some achingly beautiful music. Once again I had a hard time choosing. I finally opted for "Leftover Wine", probably one of her best. Briefly, it describes her relationship with her fans and audience. It was hard not to pick "Momma Momma", "Bobo's Party" or perhaps even "Birthday of the Sun", plus many others. This particular song, perhaps more than any other, showcases her amazing voice.

   I was watching a Harry Chapin PBS special many years ago and saw him perform a song called "Sniper". It was an amazing nine minute opus and I immediately went and bought the album it was on. Out of many Chapin songs I love, this is personally my favourite. It is a fascinating character study, touching on human nature and the effects of alienation. It was inspired by the story of Charles Whitman, who, in 1966, went to the top of the University of Texas tower and started shooting, killing thirteen people and an unborn child. Not typical Chapin stuff but he goes back and forth, almost documentary style, getting the story both from the sniper's viewpoint and the people who knew him. This is a powerful song.

   I was only mildly familiar with Joni Mitchell before I saw an appearance of hers on the Johnny Cash show way back when. She sang a song called "For Free", from her "Ladies of the  Canyon" album. At that point I was hooked, bought the album and many more. Nothing of hers I'd heard on the radio at that point really would have prompted me to become a fan so I'm very thankful for Johnny Cash having her on.

   Okay, I think I might stop there although I could go on and on. As you've probably figured out by now, I am an old "folkie" and I make no apologies. If you've hung in there and actually listened to all of these then you've heard almost half an hour of "Brian Baker music" and you should be congratulated for making it through! There has always been so much music out there that the radio and T.V. stations couldn't possibly do all the artists the justice they so readily deserve. The end result is that we, as an audience, lose out. We never get the opportunity to hear all the other music that's out there. Occasionally, Doralyn and I will be watching a movie and somewhere in the soundtrack we'll hear a song we fancy, that we've never heard before. So we look up the artist and discover all sorts of new great music! That's the wonderful thing, it's all at your fingertips!
  

Classical Music

   One evening, as Doralyn and I were making our way east through the mountains on our way back from the west coast, we found ourselves spending the night at a hot springs resort.
   After checking in and having a meal we headed for one of he mineral pools there. The water was about 107 degrees, saturated with minerals and magnificent. With the aid of flotation devices, soon we were drifting on our backs in the warm jet stream.
   Above us, speakers played soft, meditation music. As I was listening to one tune, slowly it began to sound familiar and I absent-mindedly began going through my memory banks. After awhile I realized the tune was "Streets of Laredo", a song I remember from my childhood. I was, however, unable to confirm this with Doralyn as her childhood doesn't quite coincide with mine.
   Now, "Streets of Laredo" is not classical music but it is very old and certainly has ingrained itself on my psyche. As I continued to float there in the hot springs I began to think of the many ways that more traditionally classical music has infused itself into our pop culture.
    I think the most striking example of this is the "William Tell Overture"by Rossini. If the title of this piece doesn't sound familiar, just think "The Lone Ranger". There is probably no more iconic piece of classical music than this. It seems any time you have a hero set off on some kind of mission, all hell-bent-for leather, this particular theme music seems appropriate.
   Probably my personally favourite piece of classical music is Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King". Since I was a kid, it has either given me a bit of the creeps or just seemed a little maniacal. I remember putting on a play in Grade 4 and I was one of a group of huntsmen with axes who were doing this crazy dance around a fire or something to this particular piece of music. I also remember being amazed to hear it sampled in Rick Wakemen's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and thinking that it fit in perfectly with the netherworldly feeling of that particular opus.
   Until I saw the movie "Ordinary People" I was unfamiliar with Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major". After seeing the movie and being particularly affected by the music in it, I took it upon myself to find out what that particular piece of music was. After this, it seemed as though Pachelbel's piece was every where you went, used in a variety of ways and venues. Whenever I hear it now I get ticked off with Mary Tyler Moore all over again (you really need to see the movie...)
   In much the same way, Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" crept into the public consciousness as the perfect counterpoint to the death and destruction pictured in Oliver Stone's "Platoon". Put simply, it is a beautiful and haunting piece. Recently, on YouTube, it was used as the background music for videos of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Centre towers on 9/11. The music, coupled with the fact that these were actual people in their final moments, brought one to tears.
   Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" opens with "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spake Zarathustra), a work by Richard Strauss. It is a visually and emotionally arresting moment in film and the music from it now is used to signify monumental new beginnings.
   Kubrick continued to re-acquaint us with classical music in "A Clockwork Orange". Alex, the hero (villain?) of the movie finds it engaging to commit all sorts of mayhem to the backdrop of some of Beethoven's most well-known pieces. The aforementioned "William Tell Overture" gets a memorable re-working as well.

    Ravel's "Bolero", mesmerizing in its sinewy length and driving repetition, is perfect "make-out" music but possibly none of us realized this until it was so prominently featured in the movie "10". It then became both the inspiration and namesake for Torvill and Dean's ice dancing tour de force, becoming one of the  most memorable skating routines of all time. I remember hearing "Bolero" as a child but it took on a whole new meaning hearing it again as an adult.
   Once again, as a child, I have a vague recollection of one of those afternoon T.V. serials (back in the fifties) that had a couple of World War 1 pilots flying around having adventures to the tune of Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries". It is a stratospheric piece of music, full of power and a little bit of dread, and Francis Ford Coppola used it perfectly in "Apocalypse Now" as hordes of gunship helicopters swooped down on the hapless Vietcong.
   Hard to talk about classical music and not talk about Saturday morning cartoons. Without even realizing it, we, as children, were indoctrinated to the world of classical music as we sat there and watched Bugs and Elmer and Mickey and Daffy and listened to much of the above music plus the like of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville", Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody, plus more. I remember discovering one by one that music I'd heard as a kid was classical, that it was maybe 150-200 years old and had been written by someone!
   There will always be classical music inspiring new generations of creators, whether they might be authors, filmmakers, composers, choreographers and so on. What's a little more difficult to say is what will be the classical music of the future. Something by the Beatles, Michael Jackson or Simon and Garfunkel? Or will it be more like Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire" or Randy Newman's title theme from "The Natural", both pieces of music which have taken on more significance than that for which they were intended, much the same as many of the older pieces above.
   My playlists have classical music in them, alongside many well-known contemporary songs and many of the lesser-known ones as well. I'm not shy about demostrating my love for the classics but have no interest in converting anyone. I'm also not shy about letting people know I enjoy opera and choir music. Classical music has lasted because it has touched peoples' nerves. In many ways it has been part of the fabric of our daily lives, perhaps without us even being aware of it. At times, it might have been our first introduction to the world of music and, whether we knew it or not, all else sprung from it.   
  
  
     
  

In tune

   As a child, being in tune, musically-speaking, was a foreign concept. I had gotten it in my head that I was not a good singer from a very early age and, therefore, was not terribly interested in musicality. I`m not sure how I even got the notion I could not sing, whether it was from friends, family or school, I have no idea. It could have been that claiming I could not sing simply got me out of singing, period.
   School, though, has a way of forcing you into situations which you might otherwise have avoided forever.
   At some point in Grade 7 or 8 I found myself a member of the school choir. I suspect that my presence in the choir had much more to do with the paltry number of boys (and girls, for that matter) in the small three-room public school I attended. I certainly would not have willingly joined the choir, given a choice. It, I think, became apparent to Mr. Buchanan that there were a handful of boys in the group who were going to require (re-choir?) individual attention.

NOT my public school choir.

   You need to remember that this was a time in a boy's life when his voice was as unpredictable as his complexion. We were all struggling as much with puberty as we were with musical scales and realistically being able to warble anything but a high-pitched squawk was pretty high expectations. In spite of this, Mr. Buchanan took the three squawkiest of us apart one day after all the other kids had left and laid upon us some individual attention.
   He had the three of us sing together and he had the three of us sing apart. He talked to us about our breathing. He talked about letting it all out, without reservation. He coaxed the note right out of us.
   At some point I became tired of all this and was pretty sure I'd just wasted a whole recess during which I could have been chasing girls or sneaking up behind my buddies, reaching under them, grabbing their scrotums and nearly lifting them off their feet. In other words all sorts of fun things.
   But then it happened. We'd been going over the same couple of lines of a song repeatedly and you'd never have known it wasn't three completely different songs. Then, suddenly and as if by providence, there was a miraculous melding of voice, cadence and rhythm and our three voices sounded like one voice! Mr. Buchanan's jaw dropped and I'm sure ours did as well. I can remember everything about that moment, what corner of the room we were in, which direction we faced, and the fact that I had one hair on my chest. Mr. Buchanan had us go over the same couple of lines once more and we sang it in tune again!
   This was my very first experience with the mystical "in tune" I'd been hearing about and I now knew what the hubbub was all about. I remember little else about the choir that year but that one experience and it has stuck with me.

My autoharp (or, really, one just like it...)

   Just two or three years later, in high school, I bought an autoharp. I thought this was kind of a cool and easy way to make music. We had occasionally used one in public school, for accompaniment, and all you needed to do was press one of the white buttons while you strummed. Couldn't be much easier and that's why I liked it. I played it constantly and wrote godawful teen angst songs, fashioning myself (I thought at the time) after Leonard Cohen.
   Eventually, though, the sound on the autoharp changed, the chords becoming almost unrecognizable. Yes, it was out of tune. At the time, I had little to choice but to traipse the autoharp downtown to Chapman and Hewitt's and have them tune it for me. The guy would always kind of look at me in a funny kind of way but then take it anyway, tune it, and call me a couple of days later. Substantially after this period in my life I got my hands on a book about autoharps and realized I could tune the damn thing myself! At this point, I understood the almost quizzical looks I received every time I took it downtown.
   Any time since I have tuned it myself and always enjoy the experience, how just the tiniest twitches of the tuning fork can bring it either into, or out of, tune. It is almost like a Zen moment when the two strings match each other and become one, almost. As you can tell from the picture, there are a lot of strings to tune and when they are finally all done and the chords are played and they sound the way they're supposed to sound it's a self-affirming experience.
   There is so much about music I don't know. I took clarinet in Grade 9 and was accomplished enough at making an acceptable sound with it. Our main task for the year was to perform all the scales for the teacher and I could never get the hang of this, though. My teacher was one of the least approachable ones I had and, being a niner, I would not force myself to ask for direction. My final exam in Grade 9 music was simply to sit down and play all those scales and I was unable. In a gesture of magnanimity, he agreed to pass me if I agreed to not take music in Grade 10. This was fine with me!

So NOW they tell me!

   As an adult, I now appreciate scales a little more and wish I'd payed a little more attention to them in school (like a lot of other things!) I wish I'd learned how to read and write music as well. I'm not that good at the technical end of things, however. I've sort of taught myself how to play a keyboard but I have no idea what chords I'm playing, the names of the notes or anything. This does little to detract from the enjoyment I get from playing, however. Not only that, but anytime I watch someone reading music and playing it, I often wonder if they can create it, as well. If I can only do one or the other, I choose to do the latter. And, hopefully, be in tune at the same time!
  
  
  
  

My Musical Journey

   I was driving along in my car the other day and all of the sudden realized I was bopping along to "Evacuate the Dance Floor" by Cascada. I was not totally embarrassed to realize this but new full well that I would be looked on with disdain by teenagers of all ages and, most particularly, mine, should they ever catch me.
   I imagine that I would have been similarly disturbed had I caught either of my parents be-bopping away to the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. The bands of the sixties seemed so intrinsically your own, God forbid that your parents might trespass on such hallowed ground, besmirching it.
   Having said that, I'm sure that every youthful generation believes its music is the only real and valid type of music and that their parents just don't get it and couldn't possibly ever understand its validity. I went through this as a kid with my parents and have been lucky enough to go through this with two different sets of kids of my own.
   So, as I'm grooving to Cascada, it occurs to me that if you grew up in the sixties and experienced what seemed like such a monumental shift in musical tastes then it isn't likely that anything since is going to throw you for a loop. Another fascinating thing I've discovered is that the youth of today are also prone to appreciating the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin et al. Occasionally they even end up becoming more familiar with the music than you are. So, in a tit-for-tat kind of way I figure I'm allowed to know a little something about Lady Gaga, Cascada, Pit Bull et al.
   Self-indulgent me, I now take the opportunity to describe my own personal musical journey.

Harry Belafonte

   As a very young boy, the music I first heard and became fond of was my parents'. Listening to Sing along with Mitch Miller every week introduced me to all the old classics (Beer Barrel Polka, Bicycle Built for Two, Surrey With the Fringe on Top, etc.) My parents had a couple of Harry Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall albums and they were always being played. When my parents weren't playing them I was. His version of Danny Boy and La Bamba should not be missed. It seems very odd to say, but one of my biggest musical influences at the time was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. For whatever reason, my parents had one of their albums and I found myself enthralled by the power and majesty of the music. It got to the point where I would put the album on at bedtime and listen to it from the down the hall, lying in my bed, with a ruler as a baton, directing the music as it played. Nerdy, eh?

Mormon Tabernacle Choir

   Soon after this period, I entered into a more mature form of adolescence and began an interest in contemporary music. One of my closest friends had a Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and soon I had my own copy. It had such a combination of lyric and melodic orchestration that I couldn't stop listening to it. More than this, though, it was mine, the first album that I owned.

Simon and Garfunkel

   Subsequent S&G albums ensued and the generation gap between my parents and I grew. It was nothing strained or tense but I clearly remember my Dad listening to El Condor Pasa and saying something to the effect that "That was kind of silly--who wouldn't rather be a hammer than a nail...?" Okay, I guess one of us didn't get it.
   One evening I was sitting in the living room watching the Johnny Cash show. His guest that night was Joni Mitchell. I was only vaguely familiar with her. The song she played that night was For Free, a very haunting piece, to piano accompaniment. I immediately went out and bought Ladies of the Canyon, the album that song appeared in. I was then hooked on Joni Mitchell. She had all these songs that used love and loss as their themes and this resonated strongly with a lovelorn teenager. Her songs were also filled with beautiful poetry.

Joni Mitchell

  
   I have always been a sucker for beautiful poetry. So I became a fan of Leonard Cohen. I remember the first time I heard Suzanne on the radio. It was so unlike anything else I'd ever heard and even his voice struck a chord, unorthodox as it was. The poetry of the song challenged me and this was unlike most other singers. I was in high school at the time and we even studied this song (anything to get young high school kids studying poetry!) My parents were aghast at my love of Cohen. They thought he was simply the most depressing-sounding singer they'd ever heard and they were sure that I must be just as depressed if I found anything about his music attractive. I can almost see their point, now.

Leonard Cohen

   I think what I liked about the man and his music was that he was dealing with situations which were not well. As teenagers, we are all dealing with things that don't seem well or fixable. And here was this singer who I could identify with and, not only that, he seemed to acknowledge and deal with those things I was having a hard time with. Sometimes it was only by talking about it but that seemed enough. For me, anyway.                        
    In 1970, a song called Lay Down (Candles in the Rain) began to appear on the radio. It was sung by a young lady named Melanie Safka and she was backed up on the song by a group called the Edwin Hawkins Singers, essentially a gospel group. It was a very powerful song and touched on her experience performing at Woodstock the previous year and looking out at the huge sea of faces, many of whom had lit candles. Listening to the song on the radio and hearing how the voices meshed, I could only picture some young southern black girl standing in front of this group of black gospel singers, belting it out. Imagine my surprise to find out she was a white girl from Queens, New York! Lay Down was one of her biggest hits, along with Brand New Key and a cover of Ruby Tuesday.

Melanie Safka

   I have discovered with many singers over the years, though, that sometimes their hits are not even close to being the best songs they did. This would be true of Melanie and you would be well-served to download samples of her other music. Some of my favourites are Momma Momma, Birthday of the Sun (not the live version), Leftover Wine and Bobo's Party.

Cat Stevens

   Soon I said hello to Cat Stevens, he of the incredible voice. Wild World was on the radio all the time and it, as well, resonated with a lovelorn teen. Once again, I found that many of my favourite songs of his were not the ones you heard most often on the radio. You could take a boo at such songs as 18th Avenue, Sad Lisa, Lady D'Arbanville, Into White, Longer Boats, and many more, actually. A drawback , however, was that my wannabe girlfriend at the time thought he was absolutely gorgeous and swooned around pictures of him constantly. Later in his career, he became a Muslim and took the name Yusuf Islam. Humourously, recently one of my young stepsons was watching a music video on You Tube of an older gentleman singing Father and Son. He remarked on how much this guy sounded like Cat Stevens. I took a quick look and said, "Uh, that is Cat Stevens". He said, "No, it says Yusuf Islam!" I then explained it to him.

Harry Chapin

   Harry Chapin showed up about then, with a song called Taxi. This was an epic storyteller's song, through and through, and very emblematic of how he wrote. My favourite of his is an even more epic song called Sniper. The subject material was a little dark (a man goes to the top of a university tower and starts shooting--based on the story of Charles Whitman in the sixties) but is a fairly involved psychological study of what motivates desperate people. Certainly, not all Harry's songs were dark. Please check out 30,000 Pounds of Bananas and Flowers are Red. They were also introspective songs such as Cat's in the Cradle, possibly his best-known song. Heartbreakingly, Harry passed away in a car crash at the height of his popularity, leaving behind legions of true believers.

Kate Bush

   I have to mention the theatrical, whimsical Kate Bush. I must have discovered her by accident as I don't remember ever hearing her on the radio or seeing her on television. Once again, a distinctive voice captures your attention. Many of the songs are thought-provoking and sensual. Some of my favourites are Cloudbusting (see the video with Donald Sutherland), The Man With the Child in His Eyes, Wow, The Sensual World and Wuthering Heights.
   I could probably end my little journey here. But if I did who would I be omitting? Let's see....in no particular order there would be the Moody Blues, Bruce Cockburn, Doug McArthur, Peter, Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot, Elton John, Tori Amos, Loreena McKennit, and Judy Collins, among others.
   I'm sure I've neglected to mention many who were important to me and will likely slap myself later for not including them. I have, though, touched on the ones who shaped me the most and as much as music can.