Record Recipes #41
Get back in the sandbox.
A selection of analog recommendations for your listening pleasure. Pulled from my personal collection. Today’s issue: the long and winding memory lane.
The Beatles - Abbey Road. In the 90’s, I had the same blue and red double CD compilations we all did: the volumes that traced their hits from 1963 to 1970. Before I grasped the concept of albums, tours, and early versus late career style evolution, I wore these four discs out. Singing along to Octopus’ Garden in the bubble bath after ballet class was routine. The politics of who wrote what never occurred to me; I knew only harmonies about love and how some of the songs were, as my parents knowingly informed me, about drugs. By the time I was studying music with academic rigor, I’d already buried The Beatles beneath the alt rock of the generations that followed them. They felt as overly familiar as the alphabet, and I already knew how to read. Come Together.
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not until pulling these records from my collection did I remember the thrift store artwork I collected in my teens. There was the hand sketched portrait of the Beatles for Sale album cover, the jumbo blue pop art depiction of the Fab Four, both treasured and hung on my bedroom walls with pride. Lost to time and memory, like singing When I’m 64 for my great aunt’s 100th birthday in 2004 somewhere in the California central valley. I suppose in my rush to graduate to bigger sandboxes, I forgot what inspired me to get building in the first place. With each passing year, creative growth seems vitally dependent on a return to the original sandbox in its humble purity. A Day in the Life.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold as Love. Toronto, 15 years ago. My loft apartment had a little windowless vestibule not large enough for more than a rented keyboard and Vox amp. I plugged in my new Telecaster, built by my driver on Warehouse 13, and didn’t worry about making a statement. Jimi was interested in making sound, and that was good enough for me. The course of life may inevitably present the guardrails and gatekeepers that make you forget why you fell in love with your passions in the first place. But above all else, remember: we are here to make a sound. Castles Made of Sand
Keep listening.
It’s not just a record recipe post for my birthday but a spot on recipe for me to use for Mother’s Day as my mom LOVES Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.
She had a Jimi Hendrix inspired license plate for a very long time that read “are you experienced” and my ringtone for her was Purple Haze until we both heard Florence + the Machine’s No Light No Light in a certain Syfy show and both liked it.