[Every so often, I become obsessed with a song or an album, and am wont to annoy one of my close friends by writing at some length about it in email. Since that friend convinced me to start this blog, it seemed appropriate to write the discursion here instead.]
I can't remember how I became enamored of my family's records. I was very young, and the records were stored in a large cabinet with a sliding door of polished wood. Part of the appeal, no doubt, was sliding that heavy door back and forth to reveal the metal record holder, a spindly-looking affair with large rings connected to a pair of parallel spines on which the albums would rest; the rings were spaced closely together, offering just enough room between them to slide one record in its cardboard cover. In theory, the albums wouldn't rest against one another and could be more readily accessed. (In practice, double LPs and those with gatefold art tended to get stuck, and trying to put records back between the rings was a pain.)
Not being old enough to have my own preferences, I gravitated toward the records I heard my family play. One of them was John Denver's Back Home Again, a favorite of my mother's. Mostly it got played on weekends, when she had the time to enjoy it.
As I got older I left Denver behind, mentally assigning him to the same bin as James Taylor, Carly Simon, the Carpenters, and a lot of other Top 40 soft-rock denizens to whom I had had far too much exposure and of whom I was thoroughly sick. I despised them for not having the talent or passion to do "real" rock, which I finally had discovered when I inherited a stereo with an FM tuner and could explore the rumored frequencies to which older kids listened.
No doubt it was unjust to consign some artists to that bin of oblivion based solely on their radio singles. Willie Nelson, for one, still hasn't found what is probably his rightful place in my affections, but it wasn't his fault that some Top 40 programmer decided to rotate "On the Road Again" so heavily that eventually I wanted to rip my ears off when it came on. In the case of John Denver and a few others, though, I'd heard enough evidence to know they were guilty: they deserved to be put away with other childish things, hidden under a dropcloth with a sign pinned to it reading, "Didn't Know Any Better."
I kept broadening my musical tastes, and after a couple of decades found myself attracted to the country-inflected sounds coming from the likes of the Mojave 3 ("Return to Sender"), as well as explicitly alt-country artists like Whiskeytown and Uncle Tupelo. Then came Take Me Home: A Tribute to John Denver, which reworked some of Denver's material in darker, starker ways than I imagined was possible. Granfaloon Bus's rendition of "Matthew" unexpectedly made me want to hear the original again. I made a mental note to look for it on CD ... and promptly forgot.
The other day, though, serendipity dictated that as I was passing the Denver divider card in a local store's rack, Back Home Again should stare me in the face. It came home with me, and I listened to it tonight with a mixture of hopeful expectation and apprehension. I was right on both counts. Some of the lyrics do not bear close inspection, and I'm not referring to "Grandma's Feather Bed" on that score. However, "Matthew" holds up well. As a child, the lyrics meant nothing and the tune wasn't catchy. As an adult, the words paint an affecting portrait of a dignified man, and the slightly quirky melody of the chorus (not being a musician I can't explain why it's quirky; I just know it is) is no longer an impediment to appreciating the whole.
I can already tell that "Matthew" is not going to be one of my enduring obsessions, but listening to it anew recovered a little piece of my childhood that I'd unjustly buried.
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