proteanme

I have been listening to this handful of sad songs over and over this week. I have been listening to other stuff too, but these 3 or 4 heart breakers are on repeat. (This new band Rhye and their live version of a song called The Fall is pretty perfect.) MTB asked me if that was because everything is changing and I think that was a good intuitive guess. When she said it, I thought yeah that’s it. I like the places a really good sad song gets to and I think I’m open to having those places be gotten to right now, if that makes sense. Also, I admire immensely the craft of writing a great sad song without lapsing into cheesiness. Although it not the craft that’s getting under my skin.

I keep trying to remember if we had music on all the time growing up. Kath?  My sister is the keeper of so many childhood memories. Our parents had a pretty massive classical record collection and Kath and I started amassing our own collection pretty early on – Beatles, Jackson 5, Jesus Christ Superstar, Partridge Family, Up with People, Bobby Sherman, the 5th Dimension and the Monkeys are the ones I remember. And then down at my best friend Tim’s house his older siblings had the Spinners and the OJays and the Ohio Players and Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Chakka Kahn.  Plus, everybody played piano at our house, maybe not well, but Kath and I took lessons and our parents met in music school, so they played very complicated stuff, or at least it seemed that way to me when I was little. There is a particular Mozart sonata that immediately evokes very visceral memories for me of my Dad and our house growing up. A friend who teaches piano played the piece for me several months after Dad died. I swear for a second I could smell him and see  his fore arms (which are pretty much my fore arms)  and . . . well . . . crap, that was not where I planned to go with my thoughts. There is just not a good way for preparing yourself for the unexpectedness of always missing someone. I don’t know why I keep forgetting this.