So Real

If you know me well, you know that music rather rules my world. Some folks are like Al Pacino in the "Scent of a Woman"-where smell was everything. In college, my study devices were albums. At the beginning of the semester, I picked an album that would be my album for that class. For example, I decided one semester that Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine was going to be my best friend for sadistics, I mean statistics. I would listen to it over and over, and at test time, I was able to recall material based on song. Head Like A Hole helped me to recall standard deviation and the ilk.

English Romantic Poets? Kate Bush

Cost Accounting? Metallica's Black Album

Even all these years later, songs bring back sonural memories. Some good, some bad, some jittery.

Whenever I hear Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, I am brought back to Modern European History.

Even after college, there are songs that evoke certain memories. For example, when I met the Big Guy, Bon Jovi was on the radio, and therefore that band=my love.
Then there is Jeff Buckley's Grace. It is one of those perfect albums. Every song is exisquisite, from the cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallejuah to the beautiful pleading of Lover, You Should Have Come Over.
The fact that Buckley died such a tragic death, so young makes this album even more poignant. What other masterpieces could we have expected from him? His songs came from that thin place-as the Celts call it-between heaven and earth, where spirits and humanity collide. 

Music is my memory on so many levels. Good times, bad times, times of being lost and found, times of sinning and times of grace.