Wow, as I write this, we are just a couple of days away from the end of September. I have been doing this Musical Evolution project for nearly nine full months. The post number tells me that I’m statistically ahead of one post per day. Here again I find myself wondering if I should have spent some more time trying to map everything out a little better before I started. Would it have been more comprehensive? More entertaining? Easier to follow?
Of course the other side of that equation is less scientific and more emotional. Since a large component of this project deals with influence and importance it only makes sense that the stuff that comes to mind when I sit down to write the next piece must be the most significant to me.
I’m feeling the urge to recap a little bit here. Most likely this is because the vinyl album era has just ended and that is a pretty significant change, technologically. So far, the major musical influences are fairly typical, parents, siblings, peers, radio, magazines, MTV. I find it fascinating how those same components influence just about everybody but the subtle changes in the composition can have such a dramatic impact. Siblings, for example. In my case, my siblings are all younger. Sure they had some influence but is was a much different kind of influence compared to my friend Scott who is the youngest of four. By the time he was in high school he had older borthers-in-law to add to the influence. His musical evolution was artificially mature because he was introduced to the stuff that people 10 years older were listening to.
As for the music itself, as you’ve seen, the core is pop music. By that I mean stuff traditionally found on the radio and MTV. Sure there were some sides streets into Heavy Metal, Showtunes, Soiundtracks, and progressive album oriented rock. Looking back from this point, I think that Agony by Ilhan Mimaroglu would be the most dramatically off the beaten path piece of music that I owned. My Half-Speed Master recording of Walter Carlos’ Switched On Bach would probably be the most unexpected record in my collection.
With just three months to go, and being not even half way through my life, I wonder if one year is long enough to complete this project. I guess though that my most prolific years of collecting music were up to this point. I would amass hundreds of Compact Discs in the coming decade but a large part of them were replacing the old vinyls . This kind of poses a time line problem of sorts. How do I handle the rediscovery of some those old albums as I get them on Compact Disc.
Another problem is what to do about the ambient stuff? By ambient, I mean how should I present the music that was all around me in clubs, on the radio and on MTV that I never felt compelled to buy at the time but still feel somewhat attached to. Really, there were plenty of songs that when I hear them remind me of those glory days at The Roach Motel. Did they contribute in some way to my musical evolution? I think that they had to hold some influence or I wouldn’t be remembering them almost 30 years later.
Here are a few of what I’m talking about
Dream Academy – Life In A Northern Town
The Fixx – Red Sky
Godley And Creme – Cry
Debarge – Rhythm of the Night
Julian Lennon – Valotte
Billy Idol – To Be A lover
The Eurythmics – Would I Lie to You?
Bruce Springsteen – Glory Days
Mr. Mister – Kyrie
Bruce Hornsby and the Range – The Way It Is