1987

For me the best music is frozen between 1985 and 1987. I haven't had physical copies of the music I had in high school in 15 years. An unfortunate brain washing incident when I was in Marquette caused me to dump my entire music collection. While cassettes were never meant to last, throwing them away once makes justifying their CD replacements a bit impossible. The great thing about this music though is that my spongy high school mind absorbed it all. Even with the poor audio quality and the volume reduced to accommodate age... it's like being 17 again. The words are as fresh in my head as after the first listen. The happy is there. I haven't quit smiling since I found this stuff on Youtube. These songs are portals to another time.

My fingers want to fly over the keyboard as fast as the music. Thoughts and images are flying through my head like they did when I was writing a lot of fiction. And this, I think is where Wilw's Artists oogabooga comes in handy. This was the soundtrack to everything that I was writing about. It is the encryption code for all the things that were flying through my head: pain and sorrow, joy and laughter, fear, loathing dreaming the future alive and wishing the past a peaceful death... it's all in this music.

Here's what I mean. These are snippets from the Swing of Things, a track from A-ha's second release Scoundrel Days. And this is going to mean a trip to Borders to see if they can get it for me. If not, it will be the portal to an iPod.

how can I speak of the world rushing by
with a lump in my throat
and tears in my eyes

how can I sleep with your voice in my head
an ocean between us
and room in my bed

there's a world full out there
of people I fear

oh what have I done
what lies I have told
I've played games with the ones
who rescued my soul

Yeah, at 17 that room in my bed was the empty spot where the cat used to sleep. The voice in my head was synthesized, a composite of all the chastising one little fat kid could/couldn't handle in one day. At 17 the only lies I was telling on a regular basis I told to myself. But even those affect how you interact with others so the lie spreads like ripples in a pond...
It is haunting music. And it still applies today. But now I do know that adult emptiness and there is still some fear and trepidation in dealing with the world full of people. But the same thing that I heard at 17, the message of hope and truth is that "there is still time to get into the swing of things."