Those Memories Are Taking Me Back

by Rick Johansen

On this grim, overcast winter morning, I am playing music. Of course, I am playing music. It’s what I do every single day of my life. Right now, I’m listening to Sérgio Mendes & Brasil 66 and it’s utterly joyful. Wikipedia describes his style as “bossa nova often mixed with funk”. Whatever it is, I love it.

This is hardly the “new music” I am constantly prattling on about. Until his death in 2024, Mendes had been making music since the beginning of the 1960s. I knew of Mendes and assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that this was old music that really wasn’t for me. Yet here I am listening to incredible original songs and staggeringly brilliant covers of songs like Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning and Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. Those skies don’t feel quite so grey. I wonder what’s happening to me and my music taste, or lack of it as some might say?

One thing that’s happening and is still happening is the book I am writing about what music meant and still means in my life. I am well aware that the audience for this book will be somewhat limited given the number of hits I attract to this blog.  I am barely a household name in my own household, yet this is a book that I have been planning to write all my life. The preparation – yes, I occasionally do prepare my writing, believe it or not – and the actual writing has taken me to places new and old. The old stuff is particularly exciting.

As a kid and then a teenager, I enjoyed what I now so was an eclectic mix of music. From The Beatles, through T. Rex and then finally Steely Dan and a myriad of other great American bands, coming into contact with the likes of Neil Diamond and Canadian folkie Gordon Lightfoot along the way. And so much more. From the great Montrose to 10cc to Roxy Music to Tom Paxton, in my life I’ve loved them all. Then, in the 1980s, when the music nearly died, with my interest slip-sliding away, I stopped looking for new music, because frankly there wasn’t much of it, I barely listened to anything at all.

I cannot say for sure when my musical reawakening occurred. I don’t think there was a Eureka! moment. But I rediscovered all the music from my past, discovered a vast amount of new music and latterly I’ve uncovered a lot of music I either missed along the way or music to which I paid insufficient attention.

As well as listening to brilliant new music from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Father John Misty, Public Service Broadcasting and so many others, it’s also been a big welcome back to music by Lindsey Buckingham, Shack, Steven Wilson and, once again, so many others and a how-the-hell-did-I-miss Astrud Gilberto, the Brazilian samba and bossa nova singer and songwriter? OMG, as the teenagers say. We all know her pitch perfect version of The Girl From Ipanema, but who knew she had a significant body of work which appears to be every bit as good as that classic? Astrud died in 2023, which is sad, but the music lives on and is expanding my collection already.

While many of the songs I have mentioned do not take my mind back to another time, lots of music does, as you, my loyal reader, will discover when my new book hits the shelves of the occasional charity shop, if I am especially lucky. Expect to find out why R. Dean Taylor, Stackridge, Neil Diamond, Russ Conway and Joe Walsh played essential roles in my life. If that doesn’t sound exciting, I probably agree with you.

All I am trying to say, in my cumbersome, clod-hopping way is that I am trying to put together what some people, perhaps pretentiously, might refer to as the soundtrack of my life. Sérgio and Astrud are late additions to that soundtrack and maybe one day I’ll hear one of their songs and think, “I remember writing a blog to the sound of this tune back in the winter of 2025.”

Frankly, my life hasn’t been interesting enough to write a memoir about it and I suspect the added music won’t do much to make it less uninteresting. For me, only music can do that, better than even old photos which often depict a time and a place I don’t remember anyway.

Today, it’s hot and sunny, even if it isn’t, thanks to Sérgio Mendes. Better late than never? You’d better believe it.

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