Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for New Music

Yesterday I fell in love with Harper Simon's debut CD while walking Bo through the crisp fall night. The folksy guitar hearkens back to the kind of rolling musical lines that would feel at home among haunting folk phrases from the sixties, but the slide guitar on many of the tracks makes the album feel like an heir to true old country. You know, before Nashville sold out the twang in its pursuit of winning hits about saving horses by riding cowboys.

I'm guilty of buying Harper Simon's CD because I'm a huge Paul Simon fan and the tracks on Harper Simon's My Space page sounded remarkably like tracks Paul might have written. And after a quick look at the liner notes, I was delighted to find that Paul Simon actually had contributed lyrics for a couple of the songs. But the album's a gem of its own making. The faster songs bounce you even as bittersweet lyrics rip at your heart, and the melodies soar and soar and soar. The final track, "Berkeley Girl," has a musical phrase in it that's such an echo of a phrase from "The Dangling Conversation" (Simon & Garfunkel) that my heart stopped a second, then raced to catch up to the song. That's not to say it's ripped off, oh no. The son's song is the son's, but there's some of the best of the dad in there, too.*

"The Dangling Conversation" was a track off of Simon & Garfunkel's "Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme" album. A high school friend had told me Simon & Garfunkel was the bomb, so being the sheep I was then, when I saw this cassette in a bargain bin nestled between "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" and "Greatest Hits," I bought all three. But I didn't really turn onto the music until my grandfather finally broke down and went to the doctor about his aching back only to find the pain was liver cancer and that the liver cancer was--so sorry--actually lung cancer that had already spread. As rocker Warren Zevon would tell David Letterman years later on the show Letterman devoted to Zevon a few months before he died of lung cancer himself: "I may have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years."

For me, the winter of 1992 was a blur of weekend trips to Lisbon Falls, ME to watch my last living grandparent wither a bit more each time I saw him. I got through it with a Walkman--remember when that was cutting edge?--and it was those Simon and Garfunkel tapes that serenaded me as I wore out the asphalt in laps around Grampy's block. I'd listen to those same tapes on the long trip home when my sister and I folded down the back seat of the station wagon and lay down in what we called the way bag, eyes trained on the clouds I could see through the rear window, ears trained on "The Dangling Conversation" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" and "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall" and "Kathy's Song" which in my teen brain was clearly about the way the music kissed me as I started my days and who cares if the Kathy of the song spelled her name the stupid way because it was absolutely and undeniably about me, dammit.

The point is when music seeps in as a handmaiden to sadness, that music tattoos itself on your soul and sets your musical levels forever. So even if the adult I became enjoys bouncing around and laughing to goof pop, my heart will always be tugged by the soft lilting melodies that have an uncanny ability to carry sadness at the same time they buoy hope.

It's rare for me to love an album inside and out--I consider a record a find if it includes just one song that wiggles its airy way into my ear and won't let me let it go. But I love Harper Simon's debut. My heart felt ripped at the beauty of the softer songs like "The Shine" and "Berkley Girl," and when there was nobody coming along the dark street that winds between the gulf course and the cemetery, I danced down the center of the road to the "Cactus Flower Rag" (you'd be amazed how much the cross over step your coach used to make you do can feel like dancing when done in time to a melody).

Don't try to share any new music with me in the next week, maybe two. I'll be bathed in the hope and sadness of Harper Simon's debut and remembering how thankful I am for those rare and glorious times when I stumble across music that helps reconnect me to wonder.

* The echoed phrase is on the lyric "And she drives a Karmann Ghia" in Harper Simon's "Berkeley Girl." To me, this sounds like "And you read your Emily Dickinson" from Paul Simon's "The Dangling Conversation." Maybe not a direct match, but close enough to take my breath, anyway.