Someday I will know exactly why I am like this - why music sometimes means more than people do and gets inside me more than people do. The knowledge of this is not exactly something I'm proud of. I have let it be because I have no way of solving it right now - I am hoping that there will be a way in times to come. For now, there is none.
Why can I photographically remember where I was, what I was doing (in many cases, even a time of day?!!) when I heard a specific song in seasons past? So much so, that when I listen to the song again, the season vividly recreates itself and the mental photographs, impressions and emotions come back too. Over the years my appreciation of musical things has been transformed, no less, but I still retain the impressions a song first made on me, long after its music itself has ceased to intrigue me.
This is beginning to wane somewhat, but only because life is so furiously fast these days. But for the pace of life, I am still the same old impressionable, incorrigibly curious boy that I was when this musical journey began.
So I am going to share some of my most precious memories with you as we go along. I invite you to come along and share them. I do remember how desperately lonely many songs were and still are, and how they struck the chord of loneliness so deep and still do. It would be awesome to share the colours and emotions of this loneliness. I still do long for someone to understand these lonely moments, so why not you? Perhaps you might find a colour, a texture or an impression that you've had, in what I will say. So enjoy the music, see the sights, feel the colours.
I do not know, with the furious pace of life, whether I will indeed be able to post a "song of the day"; that is, each day. I will certainly try, but I cannot promise it! What I can promise is enough packed into each song I post.
************************************************************************************
A note for the real student of music. The songs that I will feature here are drawn from many genres of popular music. Now some might indeed say, and I freely agree, is not too much being made out of popular music? It is a thing so show-biz oriented, so shallow, corny, spurious and superficial. How can I read things I've read, that I will say about these songs? Is the depth unwarranted, am I reading stuff which does not exist, that I've only made up in my mind?
A number of answers come to mind here. However spurious popular music might have been or is today, I do believe there always were and still are people out there who are actually constructing music out there with instruments we all know and love - voices with all their rhythms, all the percussion instruments, woodwind, brass and strings. Essentially, the real performers do care about their craft and what they do turn out can be reduced down to its elements, its building blocks. And when it is so reduced, nothing is taken away - the music shows the effort packed into it, the intent of the performer, the thoughts and the role-play that form the point of the song. You can be sure that of the songs I post here, none of them exist purely on an electronic machine somewhere, which can be assembled at will and to no apparent point. They are not mass-manufactured, but individual assemblages that bear the distinctive mark of their creators, harnessed to a powerful message.
So, for the serious student of music, this blog might be a bit superficial, I agree. Over the years, popular music has evolved and moved through so many genres, absorbing influences, riding the crest of the change-waves and trying to differentiate. The songs I will feature, will, hopefully, provide some answers in unravelling this evolution, and for the student of the history of popular music, will provide some pointers. Deeper than this I cannot go, for I am honestly unqualified, and I freely admit this failing.
************************************************************************************
Just a little note about why these brief scribblings are collected together as "The Cumulonimbus Archives". It really is very simple, not much mystery there. Cumulonimbus is the name given to a cloud that is a little hard to pin down. All of these words and phrases might be true of the cloud - ominous, full of portent but still mysterious, ethereal. It is a rain cloud but not THE rain cloud; so it might bring rain, or it might not. But when a cumulonimbus cloud touches earth, it's dramatic; it is the stuff of unforgettable sights. How it impenetrably renders invisible a mountain summit, wisps through a cliff-face and hovers over the waters - these are sights to be seen to be believed. It's not always a rain cloud, though it might well bring rain. It's what it conceals, more than reveals, about earth, that I find so satisfying. It makes earth seem an unreal land, distilled only in dreams.
Most of these songs achieve the same effect. Many of them are the cumulonimbus cloud itself - unreal, ominous, mysterious, pregnant with meaning. If I ever put together an album of original songs, my first set will surely be called Cumulonimbus!
So there. I am opening out the Cumulonimbus Archives. Sit back and enjoy. Get a cup of coffee.
