Lady Blue
This evening, while browsing the iTunes store, I rediscovered a song I once loved and probably haven't heard in about 30 years: Leon Russell's "Lady Blue."
There are some songs from that period that I've pretty much had access to constantly, either because they've never gone out of circulation or fashion (you can always find Elton John, the Beatles, Doobie Brothers, Yes, Billy Joel, and David Bowie), or because for some strange reason I always managed to have their albums (Sea Level's "Cats on the Coast" isn't exactly a household name, nor is the 3-disc ELP live album, but I don't think I've ever been without either of them since I was 13). But the long tail of my musical adolescence, the songs that I never owned and which didn't become fixtures on the radio, eventually disappeared.
Forgetting these songs is tough because the most powerful memories of my childhood aren't of places or people: they're of music. I can only vaguely recall several of the houses (or apartments or trailers) I lived in, and only a few more of the people I went to school with. But I can vividly recall a lot of the music from my adolescent years, and I find that I listen to those songs with the same intensity that I did when I was a kid. So rediscovering a song that I haven't heard is like getting back a little bit of memory.
For me, that's been the brilliant thing about iTunes: the catalog and pricing scheme (and the search functionality) have let me reconnect with a lot of those songs, in a way that would have been otherwise inconceivable.
And Leon Russell's work in the 1970s was pretty amazing, by the way.
[To the tune of Leon Russell, "Lady Blue," from the album "Will o' the Wisp".]
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