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Being more dimensional
Since I started playing more seriously a few years ago, I’ve broadened my tastes and acceptance level of various types you music. Naturally being a Boomer I have always been really big on rock& roll, and more metal based groups of the late 60’s through the 80’s. But I always dug blues, and to some degree jazz (provided it wasn’t too “out there”) with a smattering of basic country. Not the real whiney, twangy stuff, I am after all a tad set in my ways still.
But in the last 5 or 6 years, I find myself visiting more and more in music genres I would have never really delved deeply into. Southern rock sure, but more country (Johnny Cash, Alabama, Bellamy Bros, Alan Jackson…), alternative, even grunge. For playing and singing for groups I find myself gravitating to the “singer-songwriter” stuff: Eagles, Bread, Bob Seeger’s lighter stuff, Lobo, Dylan…those softer sounds and lyrical melodious songs.
However, the last couple nights I revisited a song from my teens and pre-high school years and really got into Cinnamon Girl. I always liked the song back then, but now understanding the working parts of the song really opened my eyes to what’s inside it. Neil Young isn’t my favorite Canadian music personality, in fact I really dislike his views on most things. As I do with most zealots when they more or less thumb their nose at things that made their lives possible in the first place. But that’s another story.
That Neil is a great songwriter is a given, and he will likely be inducted into the R&R Hall of Fame as the founder of the “grunge” movement. His early stuff didn’t fit into the classic rock norm, and I’m finding some previously uncharted territory in his earlier songs. I really had a good time rockin’ out to Cinnamon Girl and will definitely dig deeper into his early efforts and forgotten recordings.
Of course, that’s just for me when I’m playing alone in my little cave. I still have that softer side that I take with me outside my room.
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