It's Monday. It is raining outside. The sky is grey on this Winter day and I'm feeling somewhat nostalgic.
My dad passed away 4 months ago, September last year, after a pretty intense illness and decades of struggling with ill ( mental and physical ) health. It all started out with depression, in the mid 90s, and ended with a bunch of other diseases/ailments that I prefer not to get into, as that would be too depressing and not the thing I want to remember him by.
He was a funny, highly intelligent, sweet man.
It wasn't easy to talk with him about things that really mattered ( not his fault, pretty common for man from his generation ) but there was one thing that always got him excited, music.
My dad loved listening to music
and listening to music, with him, was always enjoyable. The ultimate way to bond.
I miss those times.
This morning, my listening app - which is set to play my 1000 or so liked tracks at random - picked two songs by Van Morrison: Tupelo Honey (from the 1971 album with the same name) and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (from the 1997 The Healing Game).
Apparently, the latter is the title of the first album by Pink Floyd, a record that was released in 1967. I wasn't aware of this, until recently.
In this write up I want to talk about 'Van the Man', a musician who used to be my dad's favorite artist for a long, long time.
I'm pretty sure that my old man bought at least 40 albums of this prolific Irishman, after starting out with collecting 3 of Van's albums on vinyl, decades before he acquired his first CD player (in 1990/91).
When I officially moved to Portugal, 4 years ago, in January 2019, my dad proposed that I took his records with me. He pretty much stopped listening to them after getting into CDs, 30 years ago, aside from a blue Monday or two and I have been listening to records more than CD's, in the last 15 to 20 years or so.
I wasn't allowed to pick some of his records or to make a selection. No, he wanted me to take all 200 or so of them along with me. Once they arrived in Portugal, I was allowed to decide what to do with them. Fair game.
I am not gonna lie, I don't like all of the music that my dad was into. Far from it. I am not necessarily a huge fan of 1960 and 1970s music, as someone born in 1981, let alone of the mainstream stuff.
Also, I'm pretty sure that my father has gotten a more acquired taste, once he grew older, so it's kind of logical that the music that he collected when he was in his late teens/ early twenties, isn't necessarily my cup of tea.
My dad was born in 1950 and started collecting records in the late 1960s. That is also the time when Van Morrison, who was born in 1945, started to break through.
The albums that I could find, among my dad's ( and now my ) record collection, are Astral Weeks , Moondance and Tupelo Honey, apparently the 2nd, 3rd and 5th studio album by V M, ranging from 1967 to 1971. You can see their covers among today's text.
pics taken by me, today
Although I stated, earlier on, that I'm not that much into music from that era and I did not always enjoy listening to Morisson's songs and his singing in the past, especially the parts where he improvises with his voice and stops singing, I now enjoy almost all of his songs.
Not only have I grown older and am I starting to like more and more types of music, I definitely also enjoy and feel these songs more deeply, out of a mere nostalgia. I have heard these tracks so many times, while growing up and they bring back a lot of emotions and memories to a time when life seemed a lot less complicated, a day when my dad was still alive and listening to this music, along with me, my mom and my siblings.
Van Morisson will always keep reminding me of my late father and his love for music and I thank him for that.
Love you dad! ❤️
Here's the two songs that inspired today's write up: