Me and my journey through life, from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and all wacky, funny, deep, depressing and interesting points in between. My interests are varied from one end of the spectrum to another. Basically, the disappointing side of mediocre.
I've been feeling a little nostalgic lately (do I ever even stop?) and as usual it was centered around music. I love it when a song takes me back to a certain time or place in my life. So I'm driving down the turnpike just trying to pick out some tunes so I wouldn't cuss at the traffic and I came up on Survivor. No, not the TV show, and yes it was the "Eye of the Tiger" band, but not that song. Does anyone remember how huge their album Vital Signs was during the 80's? It gave us this:
and this:
and this:
But it was this one that took me to a time and a place and a person. This one's for you Lori O'Flinn, wherever you are:
In the early 80's I got really into music. I would sit up late at night in a dark room scanning the am/fm bands on my stereo wearing my over the ears headphones (love those kind). I would pick up music from radio stations from all over, and even an occasional minor league baseball game from somewhere in the southern U.S. I was a lot like Jodie Foster in Contact. I would listen until I would lose the signal and then move on down the dial looking for the next far away station. One night, I came across this "hectic" sounding song which slowed down to the point where the next lines were forever recorded in my brain:
Mary, can you hear me?
Can you tell me what it's all supposed to mean?
Looking at a photograph of all that I have seen.
I wish I could hold you. I wish I could hold you.
Then I lost the station, never knowing what I was listening to. Just like that it was gone, but those lines would periodically stick in my head out of the blue.
Well that happened again recently (yeah, still after 30+ years), but now I actually have tools to discover what it was. Yeah, I googled the lyrics. I was off a little bit, but looking at the potential matches there it was: Roger Hodgson/Had a Dream (Sleeping with the Enemy). Roger was formerly in Supertramp, and had released his first solo album in 1984 (so now I even knew the year).
Next up: oh please oh please oh please let it be on YouTube. Bam!
It was the 80's so of course it had a video. Listening to it made all those memories come flooding back. Except...
...the lyrics I had memorized were not in the actual video. More YouTube searching revealed an unedited version of the song. Here it is in its full glory:
Here's another song that reminds me of a very specific time and place.
I was living out in Ladonia (outside the city limits), but because my mom worked for the school system I could still go to school in town. For awhile we - me, my mom, dad and two brothers - had to drive in early together in an old pickup truck. Yeah, we were packed in there pretty good.
I was the last one to be dropped off so it was just me and my dad and we would listen to the radio on the way to my school (anyone remember Bear O'Bryan?). This song was popular at the time and we always turned it up when it came on.
In 1984, I was 16 years old. It was probably the greatest year of my life. And my life back then centered on one thing: baseball. While everyone else ran around playing basketball and football, to me there were only two parts of the year: baseball season, and waiting for baseball season.
There are a lot of times in my life that I am meeting a new person while I am also diving into some new music I have found. These two always seem to get inexplicably linked in my head forever. I almost treat it like it's their theme song and I can never hear the music without thinking about the person. Usually it's an instrumental which just evokes a certain memory or emotion.
In some cases I will even re-name it, forgetting the original name of the song. It becomes "Jane's Theme" or "Jill's Song" to me. In one reverse situation, I gave someone a nickname from the song's title. Even to this day, over 20 years later, I still call her "Guinny".
The song in this case is Guinevere by Rick Wakeman. Enjoy.
Many of you have read my story about my early days at Disney and "the one that got away" and how the Anderson Bruford Wakeman & Howe (ABWH) album became the soundtrack of that summer. I learned years later there was supposed to be an ABWH II album, but because of various reasons it never got made. That seems very fitting to me because that relationship should have had a part two as well. To me it's like a whole life there that I didn't get to live.
Many of the songs have been released from those demos and some are quite good. This particular one makes me feel the longing of not being able to weather the storm and make it to the sunshine on the other side. It's how you feel after the craziness has finally gone away and the calm that comes after the storm.
All day long I have been thinking of this song, which is kind of appropriate seeing that it's New Years Eve day. I usually just associate it with my birthday, but throw in the fact that most of my shift at work today was isolated away from people and back in the woods and it really fits. And it sums up how I feel in a lot of ways. Tommy Shaw just gets me.