sus
Moderator
(1/100) Norah Jones, "Come Away With Me"
"As far back as I can remember..."
"In the beginning..."
"Much anticipated, but til this day undelivered..."
The way I always understood the difference between my parents' music taste was that Dad was up-tempo and Mom meant down-tempo. That said something about their personalities too, but the correspondence wasn't straightforward. It was more about balance between the music's energy and the person's—about music as supplement, rather than music as mirror.
My mom loved mellow singer-songwriters—Norah Jones, Natalie Merchant, Eric Bibb. My dad loved energetic, classic-rock type artists, like Dylan and Cash, with some trashy country on the side. They met in the middle over Celtic music. And that was about all they listened to.
“Come Away With Me” is the classic, but “Lonestar” reminds me of the sun peaking through to the side yard, warming the bricks. It's the album mom always pulled out on leisurely Saturday or Sunday mornings, after she'd gotten back from a run. Maybe dad had made pancakes earlier, or squeezed oranges from the tree in our yard. We lived in the old Mission orchard district, where the Spanish (or their indigenous slaves) planted all their fruit trees—so the neighborhood was full of figs and citrus.
And I’m eight or nine, sitting on the warm bricks as "Lone Star" plays—maybe it's top of the hour, and I can hear the church bells chiming down the block—and I'm setting up miniature plastic army men, which I've purchased with all my lawn-mowing money. They're just a centimeter tall, nothing like the usual, finger-length size, but that meant I could buy packs of 100 for a $2.99 at the Dollar Tree, where we sometimes stopped for school supplies on the way back from swim practice.
I bought dozens of those packs, thousands of figurines, and I’d spend all my weekend hours from ages 8ish to 10ish just setting them up anywhere with novel “terrain.” If we went to the beach, if we went camping, if he went to the park, I’d bring a backpack’s worth. The terrain provided the form for the drama: are they trying to capture the bluffs of a couch? Traversing the canyon of an irrigation ditch? Twigs became logs, mud-ruts trenches. From watching Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, and reading my Civil War history books, and watching 1995’s Gettysburg I knew all about the value of the high ground. I dressed up as a Union soldier for Halloween three years in a row (3rd, 4th, and 5th grade). When I was 8 I wanted to be a five-star general; when I was 9 I wanted to be a lieutenant; when I was 10, I wanted to be a corporal or private, an enlisted man. I read obsessively from books my (US history teacher dad) brought home from work: about Lincoln's series of failed generals, about Longstreet’s defensive inclinations and Lee’s antiquated Napoleonic tactics, about the changes wrought by the invention of the Minié ball.
I'll include as honorary mention another of my mom's old favs, Eric Bibb's "When I Hear the Waves." I remember her sitting me down to the table once, telling me how much his voice/delivery moved her:
"As far back as I can remember..."
"In the beginning..."
"Much anticipated, but til this day undelivered..."
The way I always understood the difference between my parents' music taste was that Dad was up-tempo and Mom meant down-tempo. That said something about their personalities too, but the correspondence wasn't straightforward. It was more about balance between the music's energy and the person's—about music as supplement, rather than music as mirror.
My mom loved mellow singer-songwriters—Norah Jones, Natalie Merchant, Eric Bibb. My dad loved energetic, classic-rock type artists, like Dylan and Cash, with some trashy country on the side. They met in the middle over Celtic music. And that was about all they listened to.
“Come Away With Me” is the classic, but “Lonestar” reminds me of the sun peaking through to the side yard, warming the bricks. It's the album mom always pulled out on leisurely Saturday or Sunday mornings, after she'd gotten back from a run. Maybe dad had made pancakes earlier, or squeezed oranges from the tree in our yard. We lived in the old Mission orchard district, where the Spanish (or their indigenous slaves) planted all their fruit trees—so the neighborhood was full of figs and citrus.
And I’m eight or nine, sitting on the warm bricks as "Lone Star" plays—maybe it's top of the hour, and I can hear the church bells chiming down the block—and I'm setting up miniature plastic army men, which I've purchased with all my lawn-mowing money. They're just a centimeter tall, nothing like the usual, finger-length size, but that meant I could buy packs of 100 for a $2.99 at the Dollar Tree, where we sometimes stopped for school supplies on the way back from swim practice.
I bought dozens of those packs, thousands of figurines, and I’d spend all my weekend hours from ages 8ish to 10ish just setting them up anywhere with novel “terrain.” If we went to the beach, if we went camping, if he went to the park, I’d bring a backpack’s worth. The terrain provided the form for the drama: are they trying to capture the bluffs of a couch? Traversing the canyon of an irrigation ditch? Twigs became logs, mud-ruts trenches. From watching Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, and reading my Civil War history books, and watching 1995’s Gettysburg I knew all about the value of the high ground. I dressed up as a Union soldier for Halloween three years in a row (3rd, 4th, and 5th grade). When I was 8 I wanted to be a five-star general; when I was 9 I wanted to be a lieutenant; when I was 10, I wanted to be a corporal or private, an enlisted man. I read obsessively from books my (US history teacher dad) brought home from work: about Lincoln's series of failed generals, about Longstreet’s defensive inclinations and Lee’s antiquated Napoleonic tactics, about the changes wrought by the invention of the Minié ball.
I'll include as honorary mention another of my mom's old favs, Eric Bibb's "When I Hear the Waves." I remember her sitting me down to the table once, telling me how much his voice/delivery moved her:
