I’ve got to do something. I’ve been writing about New Age for the past several posts and that is fine. I’m satified with calling this era A New Age. It makes sense in that it applies to both the genre and the fact that I had shifted from The Roach Days Revisited into another era of My Musical Evolution.
The part that I have struggled with is that so far, all the major eras of My Musical Evolution seems to have disctinct timeframes and reasonable appropriate titles. For some reason, apart from New Age, this era doesn’t seem to have any clear and present name that seems to apply let alone satisfy.
I’ve been wrestling with why that might be. Part of it might be that after becoming married and having children, my music acquisition rate dropped pretty significantly. It might be that music in general got pushed to the perimeter and forced to take a minor supporting role rather than center stage. Still an important part but the hours of casual listening had given way to the epic of raising and supporting a family.
Another aspect of this may be that when I was buying Compact Discs, I was backfilling material from my earlier eras. I was picking up quite a bit of stuff from The Scratchy 45 Days. This musical reminiscing my be a factor in the lack of musical identity. Perhaps it is hard to put a name to it because in reality, it is still in play. Where all the previous eras of My Musical Evolution have a distinct beginning and end, I feel that I’m still living this last and longest segment.
So here I am begrudgingly calling this era The 90’s. I’m hoping that segmenting it like that will help to move forward. Actually, the segment should be called Married With Children as that name supports the era a little more actively. As you will soon see, even my very young children held influence in My Musical Evolution.
So let’s talk about this Enya album now. It was the early 90’s and I was deep into New Age Music. Depeneding on where you were shopping, Enya would show up in New Age, Celtic, or World. So I had seen here name and a few album covers as I searched for New Age music to add to my collection. Her song Orinoco Flow had gained some attention even making its way into advertising. I feel that here again I must remind you of the absence of the internet and phones that cansample a song and return all you want to know about it. I would hear Orinoco Flow every once in a while, usually on the overhead music systems of retail outlets. One day, I heard it on the radio at work and as luck would have it, they actually announced the artist and name of the song. I wrote it down with the intention of looking for it on my next CD outing. It is a good song and I still enjoy listening to it very much. It would have been easier to find if Enya adopted K.C. & The Sunshine Band’s method of naming songs. It would have been called “Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away”.
I’m sorry that this is such a long post but I need to cover a lot of ground here that just happens to coincide with this album. The next part, I’m sure that I’ve mentioned a dozen times already. It is about the disappearance of the Album and the emergence of the download a track a time. Watermark is another album that I initially bought for the one song Orinoco Flow. I listened to that song. I included it on a few road tapes [Since the big party days were left behind at The Roach Motel, my desire to make mix tapes evolved into travel tapes. I even had people come to me and commision mix tapes for their road trips. More about that later.
So I indulge on Orinoco Flow and then put Watermark on the shelf. This is where the Steve Martin Move L.A. Story comes in. L.A. Story was OK as a movie but there were some really amazing songs on the soundtrack that reached me. For the longest time, I searched for the L.A. Story Soundtrack which as far as I could tell, did not exist. I would watch the film on when it was on TV and soak up those songs. Fast forward some years and I’ve taken Watermark off the shelf and I’m listening to the entire thing. Track three starts and a chill washes over me as I hear on the L.A. Story songs that I loved so much. A couple tracks later and it is another! For years I was looking for them and all this time, they were in my possession. I had overlooked them for several years. If I had simply downloaded Orinoco Flow, I never would have know what I was missing.
Watermark
On Your Shore
Exile I’ve always liked that quote from L.A. Story “Why is that we don’t always recognize the moment that loves begins but we always know when it ends.”
Orinoco Flow