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Music from my Childhood
May. 19th, 2005 06:48 amI went out this week and bought four CDs, an odd mix but I know them all by heart: Peter Paul and Mary's Album and Moving and Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood and WarChild.
I have my dad to thank for Peter Paul and Mary, who adored them, but we all listened to them. I would have snaggled several others if I had found them, and I will still look for them. The next one I want to get is In Concert, which was probably the one we listened to the most. There is a very important reference to Peter Paul and Mary in The Wild Swans: after Sean blows up at Elias in the bookstore and disappears, he is playing "Tiny Sparrow" in the middle of the night when they reconcile again; this is the day before Sean tells him he has AIDS. The lyrics were pretty spot on. (I never did get permission to quote them in full; they weren't traditional, although they sound like it, and I wasn't sure I wanted to interrupt the flow to print them in full. I'm still not sure whether that was a mistake or not.) I hope the girls will fall in love with them, too. I'll give them plenty of chance to do so. I did manage to get them hooked on Godspell.
I have my brother Chet to thank for Jethro Tull. He came home every afternoon from school when he was in high school, threw a hamburger under the broiler for an afternoon snack (he had the voracious appetite of a teenage boy) and he would listen to Chicago or Moody Blues or Jethro Tull while doing his homework--he had a lot of it; he was in all AP classes, like I would be when I got to high school myself. (My mother would take it as long as she could, but when she started cooking dinner, we would hear her exasperated admonition "Turn it down!" floating to us from the kitchen.) Chet particularly loved Aqualung and Thick as a Brick. Oddly enough, I don't think he was the one who bought Songs from the Wood; I think I bought that when I went to college (I still have it as an LP down in the basement somewhere). I started wanting to listen to Songs from the Woods again because I've been reading so much about Tolkien the last couple of years. I don't think Tolkien would have listened to Jethro Tull in a million years, and he probably would have thought the band unspeakably vulger, but Ian Anderson feels the same way Tolkien did about hating modernity and the preferability of the distant rural past. I think Tolkien would have loved the title track. It's one of the most hobbity songs I know.
What are some of the essential albums of your childhood that you just had to go out again to purchase as an adult?
I have my dad to thank for Peter Paul and Mary, who adored them, but we all listened to them. I would have snaggled several others if I had found them, and I will still look for them. The next one I want to get is In Concert, which was probably the one we listened to the most. There is a very important reference to Peter Paul and Mary in The Wild Swans: after Sean blows up at Elias in the bookstore and disappears, he is playing "Tiny Sparrow" in the middle of the night when they reconcile again; this is the day before Sean tells him he has AIDS. The lyrics were pretty spot on. (I never did get permission to quote them in full; they weren't traditional, although they sound like it, and I wasn't sure I wanted to interrupt the flow to print them in full. I'm still not sure whether that was a mistake or not.) I hope the girls will fall in love with them, too. I'll give them plenty of chance to do so. I did manage to get them hooked on Godspell.
I have my brother Chet to thank for Jethro Tull. He came home every afternoon from school when he was in high school, threw a hamburger under the broiler for an afternoon snack (he had the voracious appetite of a teenage boy) and he would listen to Chicago or Moody Blues or Jethro Tull while doing his homework--he had a lot of it; he was in all AP classes, like I would be when I got to high school myself. (My mother would take it as long as she could, but when she started cooking dinner, we would hear her exasperated admonition "Turn it down!" floating to us from the kitchen.) Chet particularly loved Aqualung and Thick as a Brick. Oddly enough, I don't think he was the one who bought Songs from the Wood; I think I bought that when I went to college (I still have it as an LP down in the basement somewhere). I started wanting to listen to Songs from the Woods again because I've been reading so much about Tolkien the last couple of years. I don't think Tolkien would have listened to Jethro Tull in a million years, and he probably would have thought the band unspeakably vulger, but Ian Anderson feels the same way Tolkien did about hating modernity and the preferability of the distant rural past. I think Tolkien would have loved the title track. It's one of the most hobbity songs I know.
What are some of the essential albums of your childhood that you just had to go out again to purchase as an adult?
