Jerry, you sure ask some thought-provoking questions. I can easily think of certain songs I reach for time and time again, but songs that impacted my life in the way I live it! I have carried a copy of Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet with me everywhere I go. One of my earliest memories is being absolutely haunted by the strains of Paul Desmond's horn coming from the speakers of the Scott tube-set stereo in the living room of the duplex where my family lived in Arlington Massachusetts. I am certain I was affected by the song while I was still being carried by my mother. The album came out in 1959, the year I was born. My favorite composition on the album is Strange Meadowlark. The title and the quirky cadences of the melody evoke simultaneously, for me, an eccentric songbird and an epiphanic walk in the countryside. Another song that influenced me to such a great effect is Tangled Up in Blue. At the time I impressed myself because I had learned a song with seven verses. I then outdid myself by learning all seventeen verses of Tom Joad. My older brother requested that I play it for him the other night. I think the lines,

So now I'm goin' back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.

contain a certain combination of the general, the specific and the universal in his choice of words that speaks to the vantage point we are both in: roughly, the middle of our lives, and the changes in our perspectives.

Brían