There must be some synchronized kinetic energy in the air across Illinois or something. Just yesterday for some odd reason, my thoughts drifted to the old James Taylor songs I used to love. I even learned to play the guitar from his charts. And here I find that Fr. Dave Juhl also posted something about James Taylor yesterday on his blog.
His music has always been soothing, but more than that, as I was thinking, it provided some decency by which a malleable young mind, such as mine was in those days, could by intuition learn to mature. I mean, contrast his lilting nasal ballads with the kind of disgusting material upon which young minds of our day has to feed.
Take You've Got a Friend, for example. Written by Carole King, I think it also uses her voice in the background at the refrain, starting on a sweet major ninth chord, which promises,
You just call out my name,
And you know whereever I am
Ill come running
To see you again.
Winter, spring, summer, or fall
All you've got to do is call
And I'll be there,
You've got a friend.
There's something very good about defining a friend like this, whose promise is so altruistic and unassuming.
It wasn't only the music of the 1970's that was better than what plays on FM these days; it was the lyrics too.
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3 comments:
Must be heading southwardly. I was in a James Taylor mood earlier in the week.
Say what you will about James Taylor, his songwriting is phenomenal. Very little today can touch his first two Warner Brothers albums.
Well...another difference is that then, it *was* music. Today...not so much.
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