Gratitude at midnight

I'm listening to Paul Simon's wonderful 1975 album Still crazy after all these years, recently purchased on a whim. I can't recommend this too highly, it is truly lovely.

I remember one afternoon early in spring, lying on the carpet in a patch of pale sunlight, listening to this music. My sister and I recorded "My Little Town" on quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape and transcribed the words (the liner notes were missing), and I carried them around in my school binder for quite a while. That started me paying attention to the words of songs (though I still shied away from "poetry"), and that was the beginning of the end of Led Zeppelin et al.

This was one of a fruit-box full of albums (vinyl!) that my Dad's writing partner had left with us for some reason. I don't believe that the records ended up in any of their mutual books, but they made a lasting impression on me. Up to that point I had seen music primarily as an expression of tribal allegiance; the stuff in the box cracked open my "fragile eggshell mind" - to quote Jim Morrison again - in a way that no music teacher ever managed. Osibisa, Bruce Cockburn, Sibelius, Paul Simon, Stockhausen, Johnny Cash, John Coltrane, Miles Davis: the only common denominator was that they were all excellent. It hadn't occurred to me before then, that things different from each other might both be good; I had thought that seeing a difference between A and B obliged me to declare that one was better than the other. That was a lesson worth learning.

Here I am thirty years later, one evening early in spring, and it still sounds great.

Some folks lives roll easy
Some folks lives never roll at all
They just fall

Thank you, Mister Simon. And thank you, DB, for lending my Dad that box of records.