I’ve written about musical imprinting here before -- those times when you make such a strong personal connection between a song or an album and an event from your life that even years later you’re unable to separate the two. Looking back over the course of a year and all of the music that appeared during that time, you’d think there would be at least a handful of those imprinting moments happening along the way. And there were, though some were admittedly much more significant than others:
El Camino by The Black Keys
This was the first album I bought in 2012. I greatly prefer the band’s previous album Brothers over this one, but El Camino was more of a commercial breakthrough and the album that propelled them from playing in clubs to arenas. On a school night in mid-May, I tagged along to see them play the Target Center. I figured it would at least be a good show, but I really went because I wanted to see Nephew #3 take in his first big Rock Show. Over the past year or two he’s followed in the family footsteps and has become quite a budding musicologist -- at twelve years old he can already play two instruments and spends a lot of time plugged into his iPod listening to favorite bands and discovering new ones. The Black Keys are one of his favorite bands, so it was cool to see him see them play.
“I’m Okay” by Styx
I won’t get into specifics so much, but I spent last January (and some of February) going through something that had me living with more than a little bit of worry and dread. Yeah, that’s nothing new, but this time there was actual cause. Long story short - things worked out in the end, and were resolved in a manner that was more than I could have hoped for, and more than anyone other than two or three other people could have appreciated how I felt. About this same time I found a live two-album set by Styx, where they had played all the way through The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight as live sets. Pieces of Eight was never one of my favorite Styx albums because my ninth-grade self didn’t appreciate it much, including this song, which I felt (rightly so) was kind of sappy. But some thirty or so years later as I found myself making it through an unnerving trial, this song became a sort of anthem in the aftermath of things working out.
“Stay Frosty” by Van Halen
I had written Van Halen off as a viable rock band years ago after I saw Eddie stagger his way through the show I saw in summer of 2007. But out of nowhere they reunited with David Lee Roth (like that was gonna stick) and released a new album that was surprisingly strong. This song was one of my favorites and got a lot of airplay in the car and on the iPods in the spring, to the point that as I look over my new music library for 2012, this was the song with the highest play count.
Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen
I was worried about this one, since his previous album, Working on a Dream, might be the worst one he’s ever released. Not every song on Wrecking Ball is great, but most of them are at least good, and there are three or four that will stand out over time as classics. I saw him for my eighth time in November -- again with Nephew #3 -- for what is probably third or fourth on my all-time greatest concert list. It’s really something to experience the way the world comes back to life in the spring when you have a soundtrack to listen to that encapsulates the greater ideals of the life you try to lead.
“This’ll Be My Year” by Train
The opening song from their criminally soulless album California 37. It’s a great, catchy, optimistic pop song with some good examples of the kind of self-deprecating wordplay I think is a thumbprint of the band. Upon hearing it I had hopes that maybe the rest of the album wasn’t going to be the cash-grab pile of suck I feared it would be. Those hopes were not realized. But at least I got one good song out of it.
“Southern Man / Needle and the Damage Done / Cinnamon Girl” - Neal Morse
Yes, that’s Neal Morse, not Neil Young. Neal Morse very well could be my favorite musician, and this year he released his second album of outtake covers that he and his frequent collaborators made just for kicks. For the record -- I am NOT a Neil Young fan at all. I hate his voice and I don’t understand why anyone would think his songs are anything other than generic seventies slow-motion picking and strumming. But Neal, Mike, and Randy brought these three songs to such ferocious life in a three-song, eleven-minute medley that I probably like as much as anything that came from Neal’s actual album release that came later in the year. I had different parts of this medley shuffling through my head for the last two weeks of the 2011-2012 school year.
Clockwork Angels by Rush
My favorite album of the year, and now that I’ve had a few months to live with it I can honestly say it’s also one of my favorite Rush albums. I can remember very little of what I was doing in the month of June other than proofreading a manuscript, but anything else I was doing I did while I was listening to this.
“Cage” by Van Ghost
This isn’t a great song, but it brings me back to a very specific moment. I had gone down to the zoo with my sister and brother-in-law to see Bruce Hornsby play the same impressive live show he always puts on. But he had Van Ghost playing as a rare opening act, and they really caught us by surprise. A strong out-of-nowhere opening act discovery is always great. Is this one of my favorite songs of the year? Not by a mile. But it's imprinted on that whole evening at the zoo amphitheater. If I play this album now I realize I remember a lot more about Van Ghost's set than I do about Bruce Hornsby's, and not just because they featured a gorgeous trombone player/back-up singer wearing a skintight purple dress.
“Youth Without Youth” by Metric
I bought the album with this song on a whim in the summer, but whenever I hear it now I'm going to visualize Dutton, the main character from this year’s NaNoWriMo novel, plugged into her iPod and rocking out.
“Below My Feet” by Mumford and Sons
The first time I heard this was when they played it as their second song on Saturday Night Live the weekend before their album Babel was released. The power and the beauty of hearing this song for the first time affected me deeply; I’m not ashamed to admit the performance didn’t just bring tears to my eyes -- I openly wept.
“Runaways” by The Killers
The Killers are a weird band. The singer isn’t all that great at holding a note, and none of the players stand out as being anything other than competent. Many of their songs have an awkward quality that almost comes across as ironic, and a lot of their lyrics aim for higher ambitions than they really have the writing talent to achieve. And yet I still have every album they’ve released; it’s a guilty pleasure like the junk food you can’t make yourself stop eating. This album, Battle Born, was one of my favorites of the year, and this particular song was stuck in my head throughout many school days past this fall.
Epicloud by The Devin Townsend Project
It seems every year there’s an album from an act I discover that just takes over my entire life for awhile, and this year it was this one. Seriously. To the point that I can distinctly remember dreaming some of the song from this. It’s listed under “metal” at the iTunes store and that isn’t wrong, but the power behind the music has a such a purely joyous quality it’s almost incongruous to think of it as a metal album. I would encourage anyone who can see the appeal of loud music and prides themselves on being slightly adventurous to buy this album without any previews, and then just play it all the way through on a first listen. You’ll either love it or hate it, but I promise you won’t be neutral.
“The Light Behind Your Eyes” by My Chemical Romance
This one is spooky. It was released days after the Sandy Hook shootings, and almost seems to be written specifically to acknowledge the aftermath of that horror. Ironically it was part of an album that was recorded years ago but was never released by the band, though back in October they began releasing those lost songs two at a time over a period of months so the fans could finally hear them. Even more ironically, the title of that album was supposed to be “Conventional Weapons.” And if you looked up the song on YouTube you’d find a band logo superimposed over artwork featuring a symmetric design made up of machine guns. That's the world we live in.
"The Light Behind Your Eyes" was also the last song I bought in 2012. In a few days I’ll clear my “Purchased” playlist and start over, waiting to see what 2013 will bring and how long it will take until life and music intersect hard enough to begin the imprinting all over again.
