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Cutting this list down to ten from fifteen is one of the hardest things I've ever done.
- "Overture from Tommy," The Who
We were six kids in four bedrooms. I was the youngest. For years I shared a room with my older brother. When somebody moved out and he finally got a room of his own, he left behind in my room an old portable record player—a turntable with attached speakers, the whole thing folded up like a suitcase—and a stack of comedy records (Bill Cosby, mostly)... and Tommy, which I think he must have himself inherited from our older sister.
Tommy was a double album, with Side 1 and Side 4 on one record and Sides 2 and 3 on the other: I remember setting the first record to playing, and putting the second on the arm that extended out over the turntable: when the first record finished, the second would drop down on top of it and play, then you'd flip the whole stack over.
When I was eight or so, I listened to Tommy every single day for about a year. It was an education in rock'n'roll that has lasted me a lifetime: I sang along, I danced, I emoted and acted. While I did, I was absorbing a musical vocabulary: the notion of motifs, the principles of musical structure, and the idea of using music to tell a story (as goofy and half-baked as Tommy's story is, you can follow the plot without an explanatory libretto). Some learned about musical narrative from listening to "John Henry was a Steel-Drivin' Man." I learned it from listening to the best rock band ever, at the peak of their powers. Not a bad deal.
- "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General"
From a Golden Records A Child's Introduction to Gilbert and Sullivan. This was a 33 RPM 12-incher with edited selections from The Mikado, Pinafore, and Pirates of Penzance. By "edited," I mean the songs themselves, especially the patter songs, were abridged—"When I Was A Lad," from Pinafore, was cut from five verses to three, and "I Am the Very Model..." was cut to two. I didn't know that, of course. This was indeed my introduction to G & S, indeed to musical theatre as a whole, and even more indeed to a by-now-long-gone mode of witty songwriting that began with G & S, peaked with Cole Porter, and probably ended with Tom Lehrer.
For the patter songs, velocity was the key. By age eleven I had learned this off by heart and would sing along with the record note-perfect. Then I cranked the turntable up to 45 RPM and learned to sing it at that speed. Seven years later, I sang the role of Major-General Stanley in a high school production of Pirates, and the orchestra could not keep up with me.
It took me forever to learn the middle verse, though—that was the one they'd cut from the record!
- "Love To Love You, Baby," Donna Summer
I have twin sisters who are ten years older than I: when I was twelve, one of them dropped out of college and moved back home. Her room was across the hall from mine, and from it rang the sounds of funk and disco: A Taste of Honey, early Teena Marie, the Ohio Players, and the seventeen endless minutes of "Love To Love You, Baby." It was all heroically randy: I already knew that music could be amusing, could be heady, could be transporting, but my sister's records, from the lord-have-mercy moans to the very record jackets (the nude silhouette on the cover of Peter Brown's "Do Ya Wanna Get Funky With Me" gave me some funny feelings), made me realize music could be dirty—just as I was reaching the age to understand what "dirty" meant.
- "Overkill," Men At Work
The Men were the first pop band that felt like they were aimed squarely at me, that were for people my age—this wasn't a band for my older brother—the first band to give me that proprietary feeling that characterizes pop fandom. I remember waiting up to watch the band on TV (on Solid Gold, no less), studying the screen intently—Colin Hay's crazy wall-eye, Greg Ham's soprano sax (I'd never seen one before). The song still holds up—it's an immaculately-crafted mood piece.
- "Years Later," Cactus World News
I could have put any of a number of songs in this slot, actually: U2's Joshua Tree record, early Waterboys, Big Country, The Church—white guitar rock bands characterized by a sense of scale, a vastness, an immense yearning. This "big music" was the soundtrack to my late teens, the years when I was starting college, defining myself, preparing to take on the world, out on my own for the first time—also the years of my father's death and the emotional freefall of its aftermath. MUSIC SAVES LIVES, as the slogan goes—and as hamfisted, adolescent and overwrought as it occasionally is, this is the music that saved mine. Nothing ever dies, it's just the years going by—nothing will die, nothing will die.
- Eine Kleine Nachtmusik I (allegro)
The old man listened to a lot of orchestral stuff, mainly Beethoven, and it never blew any air up my skirt: there was an element of self-consciousness and strain that put me off—I got the impression that this wasn't music you listened to for fun, this was music you listened to because it would improve you.
Then, Mozart. Hey! Tunes! Pretty tunes, at that! You could whistle this stuff—maybe even dance to it! Who knew? I'm still not crazy about Beethoven, but his stuff makes more sense to me now. Mozart was the key to that.
- "Sally MacLennane," The Pogues
Discovered booze and the Pogues at approximately the same time, and for a while the two were inseparable: wandering the frigid streets of Collegetown, a whole gang of us legless wrecked and bellowing these songs at the top of our lungs. The idea that Anglo-Irish folk music could be recontextualized for contemporary relevance led me sideways to Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, and the British wing of the singer-songwriter movement as it overlapped with the folk revivalists.
- "So What," the Miles Davis Sextet
There was jazz around the house, of course—big band swing, Sarah Vaughan, Brubeck's Time Out—but I never "got" jazz until I heard Kind of Blue. Part of it is the inescapable truth that, as Branford Marsalis puts it, jazz is not a music for kids. More important, though, the jazz I'd heard to that point was all tightly composed and structured—tight band riffs with designated solo sections. Hearing the Sextet creating group compositions on the fly from a set of changes scribbled on an envelope—BOOM. My ears opened.
- "Chills," We Saw The Wolf
I played bass on the studio session for this song. When Andy first played the song for me, it was still embryonic—but it had killer hooks, and I wanted soooo bad to be a part of this. We worked hard to shape the song: I sweated blood over every note of the bassline. We cut it more-or-less live in the studio, two guitars, bass and drums—and after the initial studio session, I went home with a rough mix. It was one of those perfect driving rock'n'roll grinds, alive with nervous energy. I was on top of the world.
Months later, without my knowledge, Andy took the master tapes (and a girl singer with whom he was currently infatuated) to NYC, for overdubs and remixing: fiddles were added, duet vocals were layered, and parts of my work were erased or remixed to inaudibility.
This was... an educational experience.
- "In the Bleak Mid-Winter"
A Christmas carol with lyric by the poet Christina Rossetti, as performed by Jane Siberry.
When I grew up in the Church, there'd been an institutional turn away from the old foursquare hymns of tradition and towards a new breed of liturgical music heavily influenced by the singer-songwriter scene of the 60s and 70s. Out with the old, in with the new. "Cowboy songs," my father sniffed of the new music. I wanted to disagree with him on general principles—wanted to tell him that this was New Music for a New Church, a Church for people like me, not outdated old fossils like him—but frankly, I didn't much like the stuff either.
If you've been to a Catholic church in the last fifteen years, you know the stuff I'm talking about: "On Eagle's Wings," f'rinstance. It's not inspirational, it's anaesthetizing. But for years it was the only game in town: when we did, occasionally, sing a pre-1969 hymn, there was always a guilty, atavistic air to it, as if we'd momentarily returned to walking on all fours.
I kicked around doing church music for years because I felt like I ought to be doing something, but it gave me no joy—I was never really happy with the quality of the songs we were singing; the old hymns were stuffy (I thought), the new music was feel-good soft-rock pap and I was unsatisfied.
1997: I found myself in charge of the choir, trying to put together a Christmas program: I was reading Thomas Day's vitriolic broadside Why Catholics Can't Sing: Catholic Culture and the Triumph of Bad Taste, and recognizing myself as a part of the problem. Miserable and stressed, I scored a copy of Siberry's new Christmas album: this tune came up, in all its beauty, in all its simplicity... and suddenly I had an angle of approach for the old hymns—one that was delicate and yet strong, that respected the rugged plainness of a traditional hymn and—most importantly—made you want to sing along.
Everything I've done since has followed from that moment, from the way I sing and play to my understanding of what makes for "good music." For such a hushed, fragile beauty of a song, it has wrought seismic changes.
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There is dancing still, but with more cheeky grins. There is more lovin' More smutty comedy. Inner city living.