BGV Up

When I was a kid, I spent about half of every summer with my Dad, then a reluctant bachelor navigating the mid-seventies on a circuit that ran from central California through southern Oregon and on up to Portland. The company he kept often included fellow parents, whose houses often harbored kids older than me; the first thing I looked for if we paid a visit to a new house was the stereo, where I'd immediately station myself, leafing through the house's record collection. I wanted to understand how music functioned in the adult world; it seemed like a language worth learning. Over the course of a few years I learned which albums were standard in the contemporary collections of hip grown-ups -- Tapestry , Pretzel Logic , Goodbye Yellow Brick Road . I struggled to situate Elton John alongside the company he kept in these record racks; his pop songs felt like the stuff me & my friends dug -- AM radio pop -- but, in the words of a grown-up who once took it upon himself to par...

I stopped updating Last Plane to Jakarta  God knows how long ago, and don't actually have time to be writing at any length at all about music, and yet, here I am again, lying around in a hotel room thinking about the music I'm listening to and wanting to organize those thoughts into something almost substantial. And so, to the list of other Blogger sites I've started and abandoned over the years, I now add BGV Up, in which I'll either: A) write about whatever record I'm listening to when the urge strikes to say something , now , or B) do that exactly once and then forget I ever had the idea in the first place These are the options! It remains to be seen which of them fate will favor!