It is true, the music that first inspired you tends to be the touchstone for the rest of your aesthetic life. Those songs encountered when the hormones begin their rampage through your limbic system and set all your neurons dancing form the core of what you seek and appreciate going forward. For perhaps five years, what you listen to will anchor you. Five years between, say, 13 and 18. Or 15 and 20? Give or take, that half a decade will be the source you return to till senescence sets in.

If one is very lucky, that music will be excellent. I suspect the difference between someone who keeps listening to those pieces over and over for the next 50 years and someone who goes on to find new music, expanding from that initial thrill, is entirely dependent on the quality of that initial exposure.

Yes, I’m going to indulge in a bit of snobbery now. Sorry. I believe there really is a difference between forms, performers, and examples. I’ve known people who, over the course of thirty or more years, always—ALWAYS—opt for that old Bob Seeger album over and above anything else and seem impervious to everything else. For them, the nostalgia—and the ritual—is everything.

Recently I filled my CD changer with a selection of older albums. Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxter’s, the first Jefferson Starship album, Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin’s Love Devotion and Surrender, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first album, and Live Cream Volume II. All these albums I first encountered during that particular phase when I was discovering MUSIC. 

With the exception of one track, nothing on any of them made the Top 40 of the day.

All of them are complex, unpredictable, indeed unusual by the popular standards of the day. The Santana-McLaughlin was one of those records I played over and over again. The intricacies of construction, the use of key changes and tempo modulations, the inherent expectation that the listener was going to do nothing else but listen…

This was the sort of music that set my taste for life. But it was still a starting point. From there I found my way in jazz, into classical, into electronic, into the variations of rock, into some forms that defy categorization. What seemed to me an obvious trajectory was to keep looking for newer works (meaning new to me) that teased those same responses to the tonal pageant on offer. 

Which of course initially meant following those musicians where they led, but along the way trying related artists, then stepping out of that stream altogether into new waters. Admittedly, without ELP and Yes I might not have discovered either Stravinsky or Sibelius. But once discovered, the library doors were opened, and the treasure of centuries lay before me.

But I confess, there is something about those works heard then that hold a deep fascination for me still. Those anchors still hold. It may be bias (and if it is, fine, I welcome it) but when I listen to those albums from back then, parts of my aesthetic are triggered in ways no other music manages. Even those works I no longer listen to very much if at all, when I hear them, a part of my spirit wakes up. I have no doubt this is as much a kind of imprinting as any other emotional attachment may claim. The question I have is, why do so many people remain locked in those periods, and others…don’t?

I suppose one could ask the same question of books and films. I suspect it has to do with the kinds of questions posed by those initial encounters. They leave one attuned to the next thing—or not.

As in other areas, I was always out of step with my peers. I tried to get enthused about the songs they seemed so turned on by, but for the most part the Top 40 model left me unsatisfied. On their part, they lacked the patience for what I preferred. And then there’s the whole cultural mode of music as background, as if its only function was as wallpaper, a room in which to carry on conversations or drink (or smoke), and for too many people the notion that one should shut up and listen was just odd. (You do that with classical stuff, don’t you? Yes, that’s why I don’t listen to it.)

We went to a club once because of the band playing that night, one of our favorites, and it was annoying that here were these superb musicians, doing amazing things, and yet the hubbub of ongoing chatter was constant and dismaying. They were missing something marvelous, and yet it seemed more important to talk about what-all even in the presence of brilliance.

I’ve always wanted to share my enthusiasms. It takes a while to sink in that in some instances, no one cares. Not that way, at least, and by pushing the issue you just seem weird.

But nostalgia, whatever it is, has its place. It is useful and pleasurable and I wanted to talk about it a bit. For me, it’s a special place, but was always just a starting point. All that I have heard since those first few years of being immersed in so much beauty has given me the standards…perhaps that’s too definite a word…the basis, then, to continue to find more beauty. 

Thank you for indulging me.