We did a “get to know you” activity at church a while back (2005??) where several people assembled a “soundtrack of my life” CD (used to be a thing…. keep your old-people jokes to yourself.). Think of it as an autobiographical mix-tape (yeah, that’s right, I’ve made those, too). That sounded like a fun thing to do, but every time I tried to put one together, I came up blank.
What follows is a combination of songs that are meaningful to me in some way. Some have stories associated with them. Others represent periods of my life and were actually playing on the radio during some season. Yet others have words that speak to some deep place in me, make sense of an experience, describe a reality, express some emotion.
Back when everyone else was doing this, we were limited by the number of songs that would fit on a CD-ROM. That’s not a constraint these days, so this list is a bit bloated. It looks like it’s up to almost 4 hours long. The liner notes were a crucial part of the exercise, but I think I’ll just add them a little at a time.
And now, from the “better late than never” department, here’s Todd’s infinite playlist:
Windmills of Your Mind (Remastered Album Version)
Noel Harrison
Windmills of Your Mind (Remastered Album Version)
Noel Harrison
Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman & Michel Jean Legrand
Life Is A Dream
This was my first favorite song. I first heard it on the Oklahoma City “easy listening” radio station and once called them to request it. They had a hard time with that because a) there weren’t may pre-teen boys calling them to request songs, and b) they didn’t actually have DJs selecting the music, just a program director who apparently wasn’t interested in listener requests.
Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyric for the “Theme from The Thomas Crown Affair” (A. Bergman, M. Bergman, & Legrand, 1968) starts like this:“Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel,Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel,”
The song goes on with metaphors of snowballs, carousels, clocks, planets, tunnels, caverns, doors, ripples, and more, all on the way to saying something about the memory of lost love. By the time the song finally gets to its point, the listener is so lost in the spinning litany of metaphors that the point comes and goes without being noticed. That is also the genius of the song, because that feeling of “lostness” is exactly its point.
When I heard it as a child, I didn’t understand it, I just liked the insistence of the melody and the way everything in it spins. Reflecting on it now with more than thirty years passed since my first hearing of it, I realize that part of the appeal of this song is that it reflects my thought process, with its many nested spinning metaphors and confuse me and anyone else who makes the unfortunate mistake of asking, “what are you thinking about?”.
Up, Up and Away (Remastered 1997)
The 5th Dimension
Jim Webb
The Ultimate 5th Dimension
I remember hearing this song on the radio in Seminole, Oklahoma. It sounded adventurous. As I listen to it now, it sounds happy and reminds me of my earliest years.
Sing
Carpenters
Joe Raposo
Gold: Greatest Hits
Karen Carpenter’s voice might be my favorite in all of pop music. This is another one that I remember hearing on the radio as a child. I’ve always enjoyed singing, so I guess it makes sense that this encouragement to do so would stick with me. Though I’m not sure I’m completely behind, “sing of good things, not bad; sing of happy, not sad”. That doesn’t satisfy my need for authenticity, but it loud, strong, simple, lifelong … love all of that. And her voice!
Time In A Bottle
Jim Croce
Jim Croce Compilation
I first heard this song on The Muppet Show, so that’s the version I’ll link here. This song captures that sense of longing for connection that has followed me as long as I can remember. It wawsn’t until years after the muppet show encounter that I realized this was an actual, popular song. I’m glad to have finally met “… the one I want to go through time with” when I met Krista in high school.
High Hill
David Wilcox
Jaimé Morton
Nightshift Watchman
Our family lived in Snyder, Oklahoma when I was in middle school and junior high. The town’s water tower sat atop a pile of granite a few block from our house and you can see it in the top third of the frame in this video from 0:45 to 0:58:
When I hear this David Wilcox song, High Hill, I tell myself the hill he’s singing about and the small town it rises above are more picturesque than this little town of 3,000-ish people surrounded by wheat fields in Southwest Oklahoma. But, the top of this hill with the water tower was one of my favorite places to think and watch the sunset. That’s why this David Wilcox song is on this list: because it reminds me of this high (by Oklahoma standards) hill.
Every Breath You Take
The Police
Gordon M. Sumner
Every Breath You Take: The Classics
I know, I know… it’s a creeper song. But it perfectly suited my perpetually-unrequited-love 13-year-old self in 1983. It perfectly captured my melancholy and longing. It was also the beginning of me identifying more with pop/rock/top-40 music than easy listening, opening up my ear to all sorts of new things, including other songs by The Police.
It’s a little harder to enjoy these days, having learned more about the very real threats of stalking and domestic violence. It does do it’s job as a time-machine, though, whisking me back to 1983.
A Million Dreams
Ziv Zaifman, Hugh Jackman & Michelle Williams
Benj Pasek & Justin Paul
The Greatest Showman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Benj Pasek & Justin Paul
The Greatest Showman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Going To Another Place
Mannheim Steamroller
Chip Davis
FreshAire II
Chip Davis
FreshAire II
Hold It up to the Light
David Wilcox
Big Horizon
Big Horizon