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The Old FM Radio in the Turquoise Cadillac
Music that made eight cylinders and my synapses fire
I don’t usually participate in prompts. I couldn’t tell you why; maybe I’m just a lone wolf. But, when writer, editor, and friend Amanda Laughtland wrote a musical prompt for May, The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Writing Prompts, I’m certain she knew she could tempt me into writing a little ditty.
I am a composer, and music has not only been my career but my life’s blood. From the moment I first picked up a guitar at age seven until now, roughly 100 years later, I was hooked.
It’s difficult to write a singular recollection of what music means to me or what isolated memory a particular song stirs. There have been many, to be sure.
Throughout my life, music has been like Everything Everywhere All at Once.
I live in a multiverse where I am simultaneously walking through Best Buy listening to the latest Taylor Swift song blaring through their much too loud test speakers; Sam Ash, where some 16-year-old is drooling over the tobacco sunburst Epiphone Les Paul in his hands, as he clumsily noodles his way through the obligatory “Stairway to Heaven”; or at home spinning wax of my old Genesis albums — the really outstanding ones with Peter Gabriel.
