A Confession (Part 2)

I have always been a music lover and like most, my love for specific genres of music have changed over the years. Growing up I listened, as most kids do, to that which my parents listened. This meant a heaping, helping of John Denver, The Carpenters, Barry Manilow, and everything that was AM radio back in the mid seventies. This lasted into the early eighties, but there was looming on the horizon a change that no one had foreseen...cable television.

My dad came home one summer day in 1982 and said we were getting cable. The one thing he was leery of was this channel Cinema X, which turned out to be the movie channel Cinemax, which late on Friday and Saturday nights turned out to be Cinema X, but that's for another post. Needless to say, we wound up getting cable that summer of '82. I was 14.

The cableman had come and gone and there we were, all four of us, my dad, mom, younger brother, and me standing in our living room with cable selector in hand. The slide switch ran from 2 to 102 each number being a channel. My dad slid the selector up and down the dial and it wound up on channel 23. There before my eyes were waves of some tropical sea splashing upon the white sand of some far away island (I'm from Indiana), and there's a man underwater drinking some pink concoction from a champagne glass. The channel was MTV. The video was Rio by Duran Duran. I was hooked.

I loved it all. Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, Def Leppard, Madonna, The Police, The Clash, Billy Idol, Prince, Bananarama, ABC. And, yes, for those of you reading this from the "generation x" crowd, MTV, Music TeleVision once played music videos 24/7 (So did VH1, once upon a time!). I was in my element. I loved music and now not only was I listening to my own favorite music, but I was also watching it too! I used to race home from church on Sundays to listen to the radio broadcast of Casey Kasem's Top 40, now I was racing home to see the top 20 video countdown. It was unbelievable to be able to see what the singers looked like aside from what you got from the cassette covers and the Spencer's poster rack. There in vivid color were all of the voices I had heard on radio. And the videos! They were more than just concerts they were the stories behind the music, the exotic locales, the places I had never been. To say the least, it was my favorite station on cable. My brother and I watched hours of it.

My tastes changed when I went to college. I went from being a fan of the 80s pop scene to being a HUGE fan of Rush, U2, and really got into more of a hardrock sound. I listened to bands like AC/DC, Def Leppard, Van Halen (and Van Hagar), Poison, Aerosmith, Motley Crue, and so on. But Rush and U2 became the CDs (yes, I had graduated from high school in '86 and with it from cassettes to CDs) I reached for more and more as the years wore on.

In 1989 I was 21 and married to the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world. In 1990 I was the proud father of a son, and was again made a dad in 1992 when my daughter was born. By this time my tastes had morphed a bit. I was into Metallica, Van Hagar, and Def Leppard, but still reached for Rush a lot.

It was about 1999, I was 31, my kids were 9 and 7 and were picking up on everything, and I mean everything, and this concerned me. After all, these young children looked to me to teach them what right and wrong were. They looked for an understanding of things. What did they think when they saw us going to church on Sundays, but heard me listening to Highway to Hell with my buddies on Saturday night? To say that I was confusing them is far more than an understatement.

It was then, in 1999, that I decided that maybe I needed to make a change. Out went a LOT of my CD collection. But I was a music lover. I needed music like a smoker needs cigarettes, or a person needs that cup-a-joe in the morning. What I found was Christian music. I became an instant fan of Steven Curtis Chapman, DC Talk, Jars of Clay and others. I still pulled out Rush and U2 on occasion, but I was being transformed by this other music with its higher ideals, pure message, and its Gospel overtone.

Like most who read this, I was in a CD club in 2001, had been for a number of years. My CD collection is HUGE. One aspect of my collection is a CHRISTmas section. In it there is a little bit of everything and I am always looking to add more. It was in December that I was looking to expand this part of my collection and bought a few CDs from the club catalogue. One that caught my eye for some reason was a CD entitled Celtic Christmas by a group called Eden's Bridge. I'm still to this day not sure why I bought it, but nevertheless it made its way on to the response card and a couple of weeks later I had it. But I never listened to it - not for a awhile anyway.

It was in December 2002 that I ran across this CD again in the CHRISTmas section of my CDs. I pulled it out and threw it in while I was working on a paper (I was working on my master's degree at this time). I was swept away on angels' wings from the tone of the first note. Sarah Lacy, the lead singer for Eden's Bridge, has a voice from heaven. I became an immediate fan and went on to buy all of the Eden's Bridge catalogue, and wasn't disappointed.

For the longest time this was all to which I listened, as far as Celtic music went. But it was the uilleann pipes that kept calling to me, and fortunately I listened. I began to buy up anything I could get my hands on that was Celtic CHRISTmas, and believe it or not, there is a lot of it out there.

My love for Celtic music leaped and soared over the next several years. Once again music had transformed me. It took me to high craggy mountain, rushing fjords, castle wall tops and green, green hills. You could hear in the music the history of a people, the Celts. Soon I left the safety of the CHRISTmas music and went in search of other Celtic stories in music. I soon discovered Loreena McKennitt (2005) and was enthralled by the way she told the tales weaved with her beautiful voice, the sound of her harp, and once again those magical uilleann pipes.

Another discovery I made along the way was Live 365 (also in 2005), an internet launching site for 1000s of amateur radio stations. Here I was able to punch in Celtic music as a genre and was given many, many choices. I wound up at Celtic Christian Tunes for awhile and then ventured out among some of the other stations and happened upon Celtic Highway (sometime in 2006) and it was there that I first beheld the beauty and majesty of the voice of Enya. I had heard Orinoco Flow many years before, but wasn't musically mature enough to hear her for who she was.
What can I write that hasn't already been written about this international best seller? All I can say is that her voice is enchanting to me. I can listen to her for hours and hours. Her music is considered Celtic, although I wouldn't necessarily identify it solely in that light. It does have that quality and definition, but only at times. Mostly I view Enya as being her own unique genre of music. That's not to say that at times she doesn't sound very Celtic, for sure she certainly does, but only at times. Nevertheless, Enya has become an artist that I listen to quite frequently these days.

So there you have my musical journey. Over the years my musical taste has certainly evolved. I still like to listen to Duran Duran and the rest of the 80s gang. I still give an occasional listen to Van Halen/Hagar (or if I want to hear a true guitar virtuoso I listen to Joe Satriani!). I still like to hear Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Dishwalla and Bush (yeah, I went through a grunge phase too!). Will Smith sometimes gets me going (about the only rap I will listen to, well, wait I like P.O.D. too!). And yes, the Celtic music is very much a presence in my life these days. I always return to Rush and U2. The last 5 CDs I've listened to: Shepherd Moons by Enya, Rebel Yell by Billy Idol, a CD my brother made for me with Five For Fighting on it, U2's The Joshua Tree (I still have a framed poster of the Joshua Tree hanging in my basement!), and Permanent Waves by, who else, Rush my favorite band.

The Friar