Star Wars - Main Theme (John Williams). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1977

By the time I was five, it was clear to pretty much everyone that I had developed an unusually ardent interest in music; I was six when I got my first drumset and started taking lessons. It would take another decade before I started to have coherent musical taste of my own. At this point, I just absorbed whatever music happened to be around.

This is what I listened to when I needed to take the edge off a hard day of learning my letters and coloring.

The release of Star Wars was the first big pop culture event that I remember caring about; my friends and I spent hours with our Star Wars action figures, replaying key scenes from the movie and inventing our own stories (which had more primitive special effects but superior dialog). They also had just the right musical background, provided by the official soundtrack double LP, which I listened to obsessively.

Lots of movies aspire to being epic, but very few have the audacity to open with an actual fanfare (followed by a triumphant march, no less). John Williams’ score sets the perfect tone: bold, heroic, and memorable in a way that seems to have largely fallen out of favor. When’s the last time you heard someone hum the theme from a movie’s orchestral score?

On the Border (Al Stewart). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1976

Not to be confused with the song of the same name by the Eagles (which I also love, even though there’s almost nothing less cool than liking the Eagles—but more about that in a later installment).

I’m pretty sure that Dad got this record as a gift from my aunt, and as I remember, it wasn’t really to his taste. For my part, I thought the album cover was awesome, and in what was my first instance of pop music geekery, I was delighted to discover that it was designed by Hipgnosis, the same guy who designed the iconic cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

I even liked the interior cover, which had photos of the band members in the studio. I thought that Stuart Elliott (the drummer) looked especially cool (maybe it was the studio headphones), and for whatever reason, I kept picturing him playing drums on this song, probably because of the hi-hat build in the intro. It’s one of a hundred random things that made me want to be a drummer. Weird how that works, huh?

Kashmir (Led Zeppelin). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1975

By the time I was three, my dad had taught me how to use his fancy stereo, reasoning that I was less likely to break it if I knew what I was doing. The idea was solid (I did indeed treat his stereo with respect), and it turned out that the stereo was an excellent babysitter. In a stroke of genius, my parents used our reel-to-reel tape deck to record my favorite music on a 7” double-length reel, which gave two uninterrupted hours of playing time on each side. I’d get on my rocking horse, put on my dad’s headphones, and rock along to my favorite music. I usually fell asleep before the tape was done. Dad later described this discovery as “like finding money in the street” (I was evidently kind of a high maintenance kid).

I remember Mom taking me to buy Physical Graffiti (the record on which this song appears) as a gift for my dad; it was probably a Christmas present. I loved the intricate album cover, which featured the façade of a building with cut-outs in place of the windows; depending on how you inserted the record sleeves, you could see the album title or other interesting pictures.

If the cover was great, the actual music was even better. My favorite song was Kashmir, and Dad would bounce me on his knee as we listened. Each section was carefully choreographed with its own distinct bouncing pattern. The best part was the chorus, where Dad would pull out all the stops, making funny faces and bouncing me as vigorously as possible while I nearly collapsed with laughter. It’s fortunate that Dad was in good shape because all this bouncing took a lot of stamina: the song is eight-and-a-half minutes long, and I usually wanted to listen to it over and over.

Everything’s Got ‘Em (Harry Nilsson). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1974

This song is from The Point!, which is by far the coolest record I listened to as a preschooler. I loved the story; I loved the melodies; I loved the lyrics. I even loved the cover art. I fervently wanted to have a triangle-shaped hat just like the main character, Oblio. When I rediscovered the music of Harry Nilsson many years later, I caught a lot more in the lyrics (some of which probably didn’t belong on a kids’ record in the first place), but I give Nilsson credit for not condescending to his audience; he made a great record for kids or otherwise. This song shows off Nilsson at his best: a catchy melody, an unconventional metric structure, and a fantastic arrangement by George Tipton. I think that the best songs on this record can easily hold their own with the best of Nilsson’s work.

The Riddle Song (Joan Baez). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1973

My first musical memory is the sound of my mother singing lullabies to me, and she had a pretty wide repertoire of folk songs (of which The Riddle Song is the most vivid for me). When I listen to Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Buffy Sainte-Marie records from the late sixties and early seventies, it’s a little strange, because they all sound like they’re covering my Mom.

Mom also played guitar, and I think this gave me the earliest idea that playing an instrument was a cool thing for a grownup to do; I still feel that way. Hearing this song reminds me of being rocked to sleep, and I think about it every time I sing to my kids. I hope they have happy memories of me singing to them, too.