Memories -- Some Favorite Songs

Many of us have favorite songs from many artists. There are songs that we could listen to over and over again if we could. I probably have several hundred songs that I truly love and thousands that I enjoy.

I am not big on any given genre as my favorite female artist is (was?) Karen Carpenter and my favorite male artist is Ted Nugent, (Spirit of the Wild was one the best album/CDs ever made) and you don't get much difference in style than between those two. I also love classical music, "bubble-gum" pop from the late 60s early 70s, old style rock n roll, country, and choral style music (though I honestly don't care for Crooning, Rap or the Blues). I also like songs whose lyrics are either Gospel or Secular, as they both delight me. Once I made a purchase at our local record shop and the proprieter started laughing and as I looked at him he smiled and said "Look at the two CDs you just bought." I had just bought a Led Zepplin CD and The Best of Roger Miller. He told me that he couldn't remember selling two such different disks to the same person on the same day. I told him they were both very good music of two very different styles. He acknowledged that I was right but it just struck him as funny because so many of his costumers only listen to one or two kinds of music.

That being said on to the specific songs. The first song is by the Moody Blues and it is by far my favorite song by them. In Your Wildest Dreams. It is a song of regret and wishing you had made a different decision many years ago as you wonder what could have been. I think all adults have regrets. In order to have no regrets you either never had to make a tough decision or you never made the wrong decision. It might be, as in this song, a lost love, or a career decision, or a major outlay of money or anything that cannot be easily corrected. I do have regrets and some of them are biggies. I go forward because you can't go back, but sometimes In my Wildest Dreams. (I apologize for not embedding but the embed was disabled on this particular video.)

Sometimes the best songs are buried in albums and are never released as singles. My favorite song by Queen is a song called 39, which was included in A Night at the Opera and as far as I know was never released as a single. It's a song that sort of tells a story of a long voyage that forever separates the singer from his love. The song seems to be a story of starship moving at relativistic speeds so that 100 years pass on earth but only a little while passes for the singer and he returns to find that his love is long dead.
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew.
The version that I am embedding seems to be a mixture of the intended story and a dedication to astronauts who perished when Columbia was destroyed during re-entry. I think of something else though. I think of my direct ancestor who led an expedition to the New World when Elizabeth I was queen and never came back, though his grandchildren later settled at Jamestown. What could he have said to my 14 or 15 x Great Grandmother if he could have sent her one last message, and what did she think when she realized he wasn't coming back. Would it have been a message similar to this song?



Another video of the same song, showing the story being enacted by LEGOs. It's kind of cute but will only be appreciated by those who like the song.

My intended third song was going to be All I Have To Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers but as I was going through the selections at YouTube a picture from another of their songs caught my eye. One of my favorite fictional characters, the vampire Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows was in the picture and my curiosity was piqued. It was their song Let It Be Me and it was so appropriate. In my mind Barnabas is kind of an every-man in that most of us long to be good, decent and respected people yet, like Barnabas, our own nature sometimes turns us into things we'd rather not be. Call it man's sinful nature if you will, but Barnabas being a vampire took that conflict with one's self to a whole new level. It didn't matter if Barnabas was a decent man trapped inside a vampire or if the vampire was the true self while his ideal self-image was an illusion. Regardless, Barnabas was conflicted between two powerful desires: the bloodthirsty vampire and the sophisticated, good-intentioned gentleman.

I have seen this scene before and on the show there was no dialogue but merely a musical score in the background as the two parts of his character clashed. The woman in the bed is named Victoria Winters and he enters her room intending to bite her and begin the process of changing her into a vampire to be his eternal bride, but he genuinely loves her and does not wish to harm her. His two mutually-exclusive desires silently, yet visibly conflict in this video as the man and the vampire struggle to decide what he will do.



I am curious to see what Johnny Depp will do with Barnabas when he brings him to the big screen in a couple of years.