This Year's Love

I don't know if anyone is interested in what I'm interested in or not, but I figure while I'm "blogging", I'll lay it all out there.

I have a long and varied list of musical tastes that tend to range from Andrew Lloyd Weber to Patsy Cline to Pearl Jam to Black Eyed Peas. (I happen to own, in fact, a Black Eyed Peas album from the late 90's, pre-Fergie and Taboo.) Despite my various musical loves, however, I do have a stand alone favorite artist, and that would be one David Gray. He has the kind of music that requires a long drive or a rainy day and a bottle of wine (don't get confused: I don't mean a long drive and a bottle of wine). It's soulful, it's challenging, it speaks to me and makes me feel alive. His voice is raw and powerful, his lyrics are some of the best, and his music is haunting.

It also helps that I seem to associate the music of his that I have owned with major life events. My first David Gray "album" was really more of a mix CD made by a friend that contained a lot of music from White Ladder, but with some of his other songs mixed in as well. I could sing almost every word to that CD. I was listening to that CD almost daily when my husband and I first started hanging out more often. That mix tape will always remind me of a time when I was letting go of one man and accidentally falling for another one.

When "Life in Slow Motion" came out, I bought the album and listened to it several times for a week or two. I shared it with my best friend on a trip to visit her in NY. I remember listening to it while we sat on her couch drinking wine, eating olives and caprese, and catching up on life the previous 18 months. But I will always, always associate that album with my honeymoon. My dear hubby and I had wanted to go to Italy and Germany, but instead of a European vacation, what we got was spending nearly $1500 on tickets to the hockey playoffs and watching the Hurricanes win the Stanley Cup. (It was worth every penny and giving up Europe to see that.) So, instead, we decided to pick the next best thing as foodies and wine snobs, and we visited Northern California. We spent 5 days and nights driving around between San Fransisco, the Pacific Coast Highway up through Muir Woods and past Stinson Beach to Tomales Bay, where we stayed in a wonderful gourmet B&B in Olema. From there we continued north through Sonoma County's beaches and across to wine country. It was a lot of driving, a lot of fog, a lot of time just spent hopping out of the car to stretch our legs and take pictures of the rocky cliffs beside the Pacific. And it was almost entirely narrated by David Gray. We must have listened to that CD 20 times in 2 days. It was the perfect soundtrack to the start of our lives as husband and wife.

And now, David Gray has a new album out, Draw the Line. And I listen to it almost daily as I leave work and pick my son up from daycare. He usually sleeps in the car, even through me pretending to sing along with David and his guest Annie Lenox on my favorite new song. I haven't learned all of the words to this one yet, but it definitely shows promise, and soon I will be remembering this album as the one I bought around the birth of my child. He'll be 14 in the back of the car on the way to school, and I'll be telling him all about buying it and listening to it when he was a baby and how much it means.

And then he'll roll his eyes and put his earplugs back in, listening to whatever metal-space pop kids will be calling music in 2024.

http://www.davidgray.com/