Favorites

It’s funny in a way…I have a deep gut feeling that the time from late November to New Year’s Day is the downswing of the year. The days get shorter and shorter, darker and colder, but I always feel that once I get into the new year, that the world is back on the upswing. Inevitably, this feeling is somewhat deflated by the fact that the coldest weather of the winter seems to hit in January. On the other hand, there was light in the sky at 4:30 today, which was definitely not the case a few weeks ago. The world turns.

For a while, it was our habit at work to bring a top five list to our weekly project manager meetings. We assigned ourselves a topic (favorite books, music, etc.) and shared our favorites. It was an illuminating peek into our coworkers’ minds. I dug a few out the other day and thought I’d post one, with some annotations on why I made my choices. I’ll post a few more in future. These are circa mid-2006, for those as might care.

Top 5 Favorite Songs
5) Men at Work — “Down Under” Colin Hay and company’s stirring evocation of Australian patriotism has always struck a chord with me. Also, in college, there was an accompanying dance. That, I’m not going into.

4) Jethro Tull — “Thick as a Brick” After running across a cassette of this album/song in my Dad’s collection, it lived in my car’s tape player for a month or more. The lyrics, the flutes, the operatic scale of the thing…to an adolescent pretending to intellectualism, it was heady stuff.

3) Arlo Guthrie — “Darkest Hour” Guthrie is a great storyteller in prose or song, and this sweet little dreamscape centering around an assignation with a mysterious lover hit my ears around the time I really fell in love for the first time. ‘Nuff said.

2) They Might Be Giants — “Ana Ng” Everyone’s heard Flood, but the listening to the geeky anthem of disconnected love that opens Lincoln was, I think, the first time that I really rocked out, to the extent that a 14-year-old in Converse high-tops and a beret can do so.

1) Paul Simon — “Boy in the Bubble” I’m generally skeptical of the idea of a book, movie, or song changing someone’s life, but hearing Simon’s Graceland for the first time was a revelatory experience, and the opening accordions and lyrical depictions of a world of chaos and miracles still bring that back to me.

Closing note: As I wrote these up, I noticed that my reasons for choosing most of them harked back to my adolescence. Since I hated adolescence, I found this puzzling. I suppose that each of the songs above represents a formative moment of some sort for me. Perhaps if I try the exercise again in another decade, I’ll be writing about the songs I listened to in my mid-to-late twenties.

Irrelevant note: It just occurred to me that when you’re ordering a latte, specifying small, medium, or large just indicates how dilute you want your espresso. The only thing that’s changing there is the amount of milk. This is obvious, sure, but not the obvious kind of obvious.