From the Salmon

I began my day yesterday by reading a great post over at Bad Christian about Brandon’s musical journey. As I checked my nets from time to time throughout the day, I found that I was catching more and more folks with music on the mind. I know I’m a little late to the game, but this is something I’m likely to write about a lot. So we may as well start here.

Brandon writes about an on-again-off-again infatuation with music. For me, it’s been more of a torrid affair. That started in childhood. And… Well…

OK, so that metaphor didn’t go where I had hoped it would go. But as I was growing up, I was alway surrounded by music.

My parents were very musical people, who almost always had the radio on or a record playing. During those years, I listened to a lot of classical music. When I moved to a new school in fourth grade, and my teacher asked the class a series of questions so that we could get to know each other better, most of the class listed a song from Thriller as their favorite, since it was dominating the charts at the time. Me? Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Um… I wasn’t very popular.

Like Brandon, I also went through a pretty fierce CCM phase. When my parents weren’t playing WFMT (Chicago’s classical station), they were playing WETN (from Wheaton College) and WMBI (from Moody Bible Institute). So I had a Steve Camp pin on my jean jacket. On Easter, I’d find myself truly moved by Carman’s “The Champion.” As I mentioned in the comments of Brandon’s post, I seem to remember dancing around my room, fist pumping, singing “This Means WAR!” Needless to say, this disturbs me on so many levels. More on that feeling later, but for now… Thanks, Petra! (Ack! They’re still together!)

Eventually, I figured out that there were other stations on the radio and I became interested in the music that my friends were listening to. Since it was the mid-80s, most of it was really as silly as CCM.

All of this is only prelude to what music has become for me. Then, music entertained me and even moved me. Or at least manipulated me. Now, it still entertains me, but it also feeds me, shapes me, and sustains me.

If I try to trace the transition, I think it leads back to a moment and a man. The moment, oddly enough, happened when I was rocking out to the Bangles’ “Hazy Shade of Winter.” My father pulled out one of his Simon & Garfunkel records and I was on my way.... The man was one of my high school youth group leaders, who let us hang out in his basement apartment listening to his killer stereo in the dark. He introduced me to Peter Gabriel, Harrod & Funck, Robbie Robertson, and the early days of the Vigilantes of Love. I’d never experienced anything like listening to “Mercy Street” in the dark through first-rate headphones. And in all my years of listening to Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, I’d never heard lyrics like Mr. Simon’s or Mr. Mallonee’s. I had found something that had, in Brandon’s words, filled that “CCM sized hole in my heart.”

From there, the stream winds a lot, through folk and jam bands and folk and bluegrass and folk and indie and back to folk again. Willy Porter‘s “Angry Words” and Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” got me through some dark days. ShawnandToriandAniandDar sang me to shore. My best man gave me Ani and the Judybats and Marc Cohn and Carrie Newcomer and Lyle Lovett. Dave Matthews, Vertical Horizon, Little Sister and Guster led me to my wife. Brandon offers David Wilcox, the Indigo Girls, Kelly Joe Phelps and U2. I see him and raise him Richard Shindell, the Story, Peter Mulvey and Iron and Wine.

In later posts, I hope to share more about some of the songs that have meant the most to me. But tonight’s post is more about the journey. And I’m probably already boring you. And I’ve got a dinner date with my wife, who I met at a concert nine years ago tonight.

I also look forward to highlighting and adding to some of the other great posts I read yesterday. But not now. Now I have to do a very scary thing for me… Hit “Publish” and send this out for all to see.