Cracked Window

When I say “album,” some young people look as if I’ve uttered a foreign word. Thus this headline touting the top 25 theme or concept albums caught my eye.

Cohesiveness in these works is lost in today’s random-shuffle world. My favorite (not that I’ve heard them all) is Sufjan Stevens‘ Illinoise. His “John Wayne Gacey, Jr.” makes me want to weep.

And surely someone has compiled another list of albums, albums forever linked to an experience, enshrining them in memory’s Hall of Fame.

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News comes that my grown son, Zachary, is learning the banjo. I knew that like me he loves the instrument’s sound — singular and echoing and mournful. Not discordant but of the earth in the way the guitar and other stringed instruments are not. I didn’t know he harbored ambition to make music.

The news made me wonder whether musical tastes are genetically linked. For two people born thirty-five years apart, we share remarkably similar likes when it comes to bands. In our personal relationship we’ve had plenty of differences over the years, but we delight in exposing each other to our individual discoveries of singers.

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