This will work better if when you come to a song you click the link and listen to it. Please.

I’ve put away all my notes, maps, pictures, and other paraphernalia surrounding the life I led when I was nineteen-years-old. I had much of it hanging on my back for decades as I wrote, rewrote, trashed, rewrote, destroyed, started over, ripped up, burned, buried, and then rewrote one more time my newest book, about when I was that age and spent time with a friend of mine at the time. The book will never be what I wanted it to be, but it is finally about what I had envisioned–it isn’t about him, it’s not even about me. It’s about that hope you carry with you, often blindly, when you are first on your own and you still believe you can do anything.

At the time I listened to a song by Dan Hill which to this day reminds me of him and back then, “If Dreams Had Wings.” I listened to it tonight one more time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCtI4bJyeyE

I’ve been immersed in music since I’m a child. My mother always had the radio on, and she was always singing. If she didn’t know the words she would make them up, but singing, dancing, that was Mom. I most definitively inherited my love of music from her. Even now I remember the words to nearly every song from my youth, from the late sixties when I was still in single digits through the seventies and right on into the now. So when a song from then comes on the radio–yes, I still listen to the radio so I keep track of memories and stay up to date on what’s new–I not only can sing along, much to the disappointment of those around me, but I can usually tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the music. And I can always associate a person with the song.

Early on was the Beatles (my sister) or teen idols like Bobby Sherman (my sister) or British invaders like Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five (my brother). But when we moved further out on the Island and I spent most of my time in nature along the Great South Bay, the music changed with the landscape. It was John Denver most of the time, and later when hiking with my friend Eddie through the trails it was anything by Neil Diamond or Harry Chapin and the Fab Four. When I hear “The Long and Winding Road” I think of Eddie. The Beatles had just broken up and we sang that one to death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR4HjTH_fTM

Then I learned guitar. That, combined with a move south and new friendships, most notably to my still-dear friend, musician Jonmark Stone, considerably expanded my knowledge of music. We had the same taste in writers and performers, but he knew of people I hadn’t heard of. When I went to college with my guitar, I brought along John and Neil, but also Dan Fogelberg and Dylan, CSN and Dan Hill, and in a way, Jonmark.

http://jm@jonmarkstone.com/mp3/people.mp3

Music takes me right to places he played back in Virginia Beach, right to Eddie’s side, right to Mom in the kitchen as she made dinner and sang something nonsensical to make me laugh. It always worked.

Over time we formulate a soundtrack that transports us to a particular person or place, and especially a unique time. Obviously, environment is everything with this; I know the lyrics to a slew of songs from the forties and fifties because of my mom, and while I was too young to catch most of the sixties folk music the first time through, my sister’s interest fell squarely on my shoulders, as did quite literally her guitar.

Unfortunately, music can blindside us when we least want it to. I am having trouble listening to some particular songs because of association. Dan Hill destroyed me tonight. It has all been too much. But other songs are currently banned as well. I can’t deal with “The Waters of March” (Letty) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2kuAYOpBE, “Bookends” (Dave S) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sovVYInjHjw&list=RDsovVYInjHjw&start_radio=1, “Singing Skies and Dancing Waters” (Fr Dan Riley) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H014dRyG3uU&list=RDH014dRyG3uU&start_radio=1, or “Beautiful Boy” (Cole) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BZkYfqa4Fs&list=RD1BZkYfqa4Fs&start_radio=1 because life really is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

I have shelved a few of my favorites, including “For A Dancer” (Roberta) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQPvdCWZWzE&list=RDBQPvdCWZWzE&start_radio=1, “Dust in the Wind” (Dave W) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH2w6Oxx0kQ&list=RDtH2w6Oxx0kQ&start_radio=1, and “Sky Blue and Black” (Joe) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaT04YFgAIY&list=RDZaT04YFgAIY&start_radio=1

Because sometimes I still look for people I love who are gone, and I needn’t turn any further than a song.

You’re the color of the sky
Reflected in each store-front window pane
You’re the whispering and the sighing of my tires in the rain

You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I’ll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows

And the faces on the avenue
That’s the way love is

There is hope, luckily. Not all music reminds me of dead people. Some music reminds me of now, of the people who have been in my life forever and still are. Like “Along the Road” (Sean) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywx6CIw3RIA&list=RDywx6CIw3RIA&start_radio=1, and most significantly, “House at Pooh Corner” (Michael) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH8MzXPK29A.

And because there are some friends who go and then come back as if they had never left to begin with, just like there are memories which go and come back as if I am young again, standing in the kitchen watching my mom dance to some tune on the radio, because my life is riddled with repeats and reappearances, the one song which seems to define it all is “Circle.” Some music I can’t listen to much anymore. It is too real or too recent. But Harry reminds me, as music has always reminded me, that “we’ll all be together again.”

Honestly, if you’ve skipped all the other tunes until now, at the very least listen to this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW0vjZiu_rw&list=RDfW0vjZiu_rw&start_radio=1

No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There’s no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.