Music Appreciation

"With age and maturity comes appreciation."

A few years ago a friend of mine told the story of how as a child she was dragged by her father to see Johnny Cash live in concert. At the time, she was not into country music and despised going.

As she grew older, her love and appreciation for different genre's of music grew and that concert would forever be etched in her mind as a special moment.

When I was a pre-teen and teenager my love for rock and roll was my go to music. Whenever I hung out with my friends we always mocked those that loved country music, disco, Barry Manilow, Abba and many more of the 70's pop stars. If any of us even mentioned we loved anything other than rock and roll, we were taking the risk of losing our manhood (man card) amongst our friends and forever shunned from society!

As a busboy at an Italian restaurant in high school, we had a bartender who often brought his Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums to play in the lounge. Naturally, us rock and roll busboys quite regularly picked on this guy to no end.

Today, as I have grown older my appreciation for different styles of music has broadened to new heights. But, isn't that the way it happens when we get older?

My familiarity of old school country music artists stems for the many childhood road trips dad took us on, as we were "forced" to listen to that God awful music which is now surprisingly added to my music collections.

My musical tastes now range from Rocky Mountain High (John Denver) to Misty Mountain Hop (Led Zeppelin), old hymns like His Eye is on the Sparrow to Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, the Doobie Brothers Long Train Running to Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train, and from time to time I enjoy the laid back sounds of the Carpenters Top of the World mixed in with Queen's anthem We Will Rock You.

I sometimes wonder what my old high school friends are listening to now, right now I can imagine at least one of them is probably grooving to the sounds of Michael Bolton.

"Age is a very high price to pay for maturity".