Shuffle With Me

Last week I posted about my admittedly non-hip tastes in music. So when I read Katie’s post the other day where she hit “shuffle” on her iPod and then commented on the first ten songs to play, I chuckled to myself, realizing that this could be far too revealing for me to try. After all, among the ten songs fate revealed could be masterpieces by Michael Bolton (blue-eyed-soul!), Britney Spears (from the time I downloaded “Toxic” for Devoted Wife’s exercise playlist and then kept it on my iPod for my exercise playlist, which admittedly hasn’t been played for a while) or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

But I decided to give it a go this morning as I drove to work, just to see what I'd find. The result was that some of the songs brought back some great memories. Given that I don’t keep a journal or diary, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make some sort of record of a few of these thoughts so that Baby Kate (and Devoted Wife and I) can one day realize what I was like when I was younger. So here’s my list in order that they randomly played (be warned - you may not have time to take the stroll down my memory road that this will require):

1. What Is And What Should Never Be, Led Zeppelin. A solid first offering, to be sure. About the time in junior high when many of my friends were saying no to Billy Ocean, Bon Jovi and the rest of what was playing on Salt Lake City’s 99 KCPX (Top 40) and migrating to the much hipper KJQ, I turned my radio dial the other way: back in time. I discovered Led Zeppelin and a whole host of other classic rock bands. Led Zeppelin quickly became my favorite, with Robert Plant’s otherworldly, plaintive voice, Jimmy Page’s innovative guitar work and the best rhythm section to ever play music on Planet Earth. By high school, I had started to play the guitar as well, and was hanging out with other guys who were very good guitarists, which ultimately led to us forming a cover band and our pizza-party-winning performance of Stairway to Heaven at our school Battle of the Bands. Oh, we were Gods of Rock. And one day after our performance I even heard my mom humming Stairway to Heaven, of all things.

2. Its All About Our Love, Sade. When I wrote that some of these songs brought back great memories, I was NOT talking about this song. Sure, I bought Sade’s Lover’s Rock a long time ago with a specific purpose in mind (that went largely unfulfilled) but I don’t remember ever even hearing this song. With one of the most repetitive drum machine beats ever (it reminds me of “Rock Rhythm #3” from my first electric keyboard), Sade’s repeated lyric “After all this time” sounds more like she’s been doing time in the same cell as her man and that she’s not happy about it. I’ll definitely keep Sade on the iPod but this song will soon disappear.

3. If You Aint Lovin’, You Aint Livin’, George Strait. Great throwback song to the old sound of country music. I’d almost forgotten that sandwiched between my Top 40 and classic rock years were a couple of years when I went almost exclusively country, at least musically. I was really into Hank Williams, Jr., George Strait, Randy Travis, Tanya Tucker and a bunch of singers who were “country when country wasn’t cool.” By the end of junior high I’d found my passion with classic rock (maybe because that was what was playing in the weight room during football conditioning) but that country streak never left me. And it was with a George Strait concert in my senior year of high school that I first conceived of my often-repeated-but-rarely-successful dating strategy I like to call “If you buy them, you will call her”. The way this little gem was supposed to work is that I bought really good tickets to a concert well in advance of the concert date, hoping that the financial investment I’d made would overcome my usual procrastinating nature and make me get a date early. Instead, I’d still wait until the last minute, and the girls I ultimately called probably wondered why I was frequently so lucky as to have “friends give me great tickets” just a couple of hours before the show started.

4. Concerto No. 21 in C: Adante, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This is one of Mozart’s most popular piano concertos and one that I think many people would recognize. I first became interested in classical music in college when I took a Dr. Don Marshall’s Humanities 101 class at BYU. It was one of those 300-student classes held in a large auditorium, where typically most students never speak with the professor and the professor never even knows who was in the class. But one day early in the year, Dr. Marshall required each student to walk past a video camera he’d set up and state their name for the camera. He’d then review the tape until he could recognize his students whenever he saw them. He stopped me on campus a number of times to say hello, and we developed a friendship. He came to many of the concerts our a cappella group gave on campus and always stayed around afterward to say hello and that he’d enjoyed the show. His class was an eye-opening experience for me; after I completed it, I could identify a significant number of masterworks in ancient and modern art, sculpture, architecture, classical music, opera and discuss the periods and movements in which they were created. I spent hours in the university audiovisual library, listening to the music we were studying in his class while I did my other homework. And of all the courses I took in college, I’m probably most grateful to have taken his course, as it provided the foundation to much of my adult appreciation for the arts. And I finally learned why my dad used to put on his headphones, turn out the lights and lay in the dark listening to Pavarotti - its a transcendent experience. I even do the same thing now (however, unlike him I don’t have a twelve foot spiral cord stretching across the living room from the couch to the stereo, exactly at neck height, to decapitate unsuspecting passers-through).

5. Satisfy My Soul, Bob Marley. I seem to associate Bob Marley (really, any reggae music) with the few months I spent in the heavily West Indian region of Brixton, London. The tube stop near our flat was on Electric Avenue; when we’d rock down to the tube stop each morning, I for some reason always wanted to “take it higher” (whatever that meant). So this little Marley gem will never leave my iPod, if for no other reason than it reminds me of those days in Brixton. Oh, and it also starts with a completely straightforward request: “Please, don’t you rock my boat, 'cause I don’t want my boat to be rocked.” Who can argue with that logic?

6. Valparaiso, Sting. Great song from the Mercury Falling album. Sting is another one who puts a lot of thought into his lyrics, while I seem to get more caught up in his unusual rhythms and time signatures. One of my favorite musical moments ever is near the beginning of “I Was Brought To My Senses” from the same album, when the prelude ends and that amazing acoustic guitar patter starts in that unusual 7/4 time signature. I really like the rest of the song and most of his other work, but that specific moment for me is the absolute best.

7. The Fox, Nickel Creek. This song and the entire album make me wish that I and two of my brothers and sisters could all play different stringed instruments and that we could ride in a bus across America playing songs like this and singing in the incredibly tight harmonies that can really only be achieved by members of the same family. All of the members of Nickel Creek aren’t related but Sean and Sara Watkins are brother and sister, and I think their dad was their upright bass player in the group’s early days. And this folk song is just plain fun, and seems like a great one to teach to my kids. Some of the slower songs on that album are among the most beautiful harmonies I’ve heard; no wonder Allison Kraus produced their first major release and helped them get the attention they deserved. I need to find out what Sean, Sarah and Chris have been doing lately.

8. Gypsy, Fleetwood Mac. How can you not love The Mac? Stevie Nicks may be totally nuts and the band may have gone through more interband hook-ups and break-ups than any other group in history, but they still put on a great show. I got second row tickets to their 2004 “Say You Will” world tour concert when they came to the Anaheim Pond. Having paid more than I'd ever paid up to that point for concert tickets, I once again proved the futility of my “If you buy them, you will call her” strategy, as I lined up my date on the day of the show. But the show was great, and really occurred both on the stage and in the crowd, as the thousands of baby boomers in attendance tried to prove that they, too, could still rock along with The Mac.

9. Why Should I Care?, Diana Krall. Smooth, silky and totally sexy voice. When you first hear this song you think it might have been written fifty years ago for Sinatra; surprisingly Clint Eastwood wrote the music just a few years ago for a movie he was making. Krall’s subtle and restrained phrasing is dynamite here. I’m a big fan.

10. . . . Well, it wasn't until this moment that I realized I actually only got through NINE songs this morning. For some reason I feel like I have to add #10, and will do so next time I'm near my iPod.

[Updated: 10. Guilty, Bee Gees. I became a Bee Gees fan when I picked up their One Night Only live album about seven or eight years ago, and realized that even after the disco days of Saturday Night Fever and Stayin' Alive had passed and no one would buy Bee Gees albums, they continued to have a very successful career writing songs for other artists to record, including Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, etc. Guilty was originally recorded by Barbra and while I've probably only heard her version once, I really prefer the version on One Night Only where the Brothers Gibb perform the song. What I like even more are a couple of tunes on the album where the brothers show off how much fun they can have with syncopated rhythms: Islands In The Stream and Tragedy. The first of these will always remind me of karaoke with our good friend Melissa, which is a sight to see. And if its possible to say that the Bee Gees can rock, Tragedy would be the song where they do it (its more hard-driving than the original recording). And the chorus is another example of the amazingly tight harmonies that siblings can put together: it must have something to do with their common phrasing and vowel sounds. Or it might just be something more cosmic.]

I guess what I learned in doing this is that while my taste in music may not be very current, its very me, and represents a lot of what I really enjoy. Its varied, too; these selections span jazz, [disco,] classical, country, classic rock, folk/bluegrass, reggae, pop and whatever category you put Sade in. I think that variety represents me as well, as I don't like to be pigeonholed into any one particular category.

Well, maybe if that category is "Renaissance Men."