I've been thinking about songs that made me happy over the past year.
In a year stuffed with ugly war, an ugly election and, for some of us, fires burning up our friends’ homes, I’ve found solace in three songs that I play over and again.
BECOME A FREE SUBSCRIBER TO I’VE BEEN THINKING
I’d never heard of Rodney Crowell when this song came up on Spotify; I stopped what I was doing to write down the title and singer. It Ain’t Over Yet is now one of my mottos in trying times, and this song is always a refreshment to my better nature. Crowell sings with Rosanne Cash and John Paul White.
Though not as often as in earlier years, even in my eighties I wake up some mornings wondering why I’m here and where I’m going, an anxious confusion captured perfectly in this song’s opening lines:
It's like I'm sitting at a bus stop
Waiting for a train
Exactly how I got here is hard to explain
My heart's in the right place
What's left of it, I guess
My heart ain't the problem
It's my mind that's a total mess.
I’ve finally had to acknowledge that for most of my life I’ve been driven by ambition. I’ve succeeded in work and in co-creating a family, but I carry the bruises – as do my Beloveds and my colleagues –from the wounds to them and to me caused by my ambition. Upon reflection, I know this experience:
I got caught up making a name for myself
You know what that's about
One day your ship comes rolling in
The next day it rolls right back out
And you can't take for granted none of this shit
The higher up you fly, boys
The harder it is you're gonna get hit
Becky has been my companion on this journey since May 1959 – sixty-six years, nearly sixty-two since our wedding in September 1963. It hasn’t always fit this description: she doesn’t walk on water and I’m suspicious about angel wings, but on more than one occasion she threw me that line:
No you don't walk on water
And your sarcasm stings
But the way you move through this old world
Sure makes a case for angel wings
I was half way to the bottom
When you threw me that line
And I'll quote you now, verbatim
Get your head out of your own behind.
I grew up in a family that sang together, Baptist hymns and show toons my mother banged out on an aging upright piano; songs from first Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, then Elvis, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones. My youngest sister, Kathy, worked for rock icon Frank Zappa’s wife and was often at concerts and club scenes where she learned new music and brought it home for us to sing along with. When Don McLean’s American Pie was released in 1971, she wrote out all the lyrics for me which captured so much of the musical experiences of my generation, including the famous chorus:
So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye,
Singing “This’ll be the day that I die.”
I knew nothing of Keith Urban except that he’s married to Nicole Kidman, until a friend sent me a link to John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16. It immediately reminded me of McLean’s American Pie, updated for a new generation’s experiences.
Like Urban, I was baptized by rock and roll and grew up under its spell. To this day my radio is tuned to Classic Rock. Urban defines so much of the culture of rock music that still sings in my soul. I love the strong guitar opening of this song, and the lyrics are just plain fun. Here are bits of what Urban does in this rollicking successor piece to Mc Lean’s anthem.
I'm a 45 spinning on an old Victrola
I'm a two strike swinger, I'm a Pepsi Cola
I'm a blue jean quarterback saying I love you to the prom queen
In a Chevy
I'm John Wayne, Superman, California
I'm a Kris Kristofferson Sunday morning
I'm a mom and daddy singing along to Don McLean
At the levee
And I'm a child of a backseat freedom, baptized by rock and roll
Marilyn Monroe and the Garden of Eden, never grow up, never grow old
Just another rebel in the great wide open on the boulevard of broken dreams
And I learned everything I needed to know from John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16.
I mentioned earlier that we sang as a family, often around the dinner table, occasionally rudely in a restaurant where we interrupted others’ evening meals, and on one occasion at a gathering after my Uncle Jack died. I first heard Frank Sinatra sing I’ll Be Seeing You on a vinyl album at Jack’s home and later decided that when he died, I was going to sing this to him. So after his death, in a circle of cousins in Jack’s son’s living room, I told about my promise to sing to him and began the song. My cousin Pam was the first to join, then Brad and Kelly, and eventually all twenty of us raising our voices in love to our Beloved Jack.
Unlike the counter-culture assault of the best of rock ‘n roll, these ballads and love songs carry feelings of tenderness and loss, passion and betrayal – the litany of emotions that live their way deeper into me when I sing them. The intimacies of my love life were accompanied by songs – all those years ago during our courtship Becky and I danced and fully embraced one another (how’s that for a euphemism!) listening dozens, maybe hundreds of times to Johnny Mathis’s album Warm. Occasionally one of these songs carries more than one association; such a song is Linda Ronstadt’s version of Feels Like Home to Me. Yes, it’s about being in love, but in the past month it has also become for me a lament for the dozens of our friends whose homes were incinerated in the January fires.
Something in your eyes makes me want to lose myself
Makes me want to lose myself in your arms
There's something in your voice
Makes my heart beat fast
Hope this feeling lasts the rest of my life
If you knew how lonely my life has been
And how long I've been so alone
If you knew how I wanted someone to come along
And change my life the way you've done
It feels like home to me.
(This video quality here isn’t spectacular, but you can really feel the power of her voice in this live performance from 1995).