Leon Russell - Best of Leon

I remember really liking this guy when I was a kid. I have no idea whose this was. Might have been my stepfather's. Even if it was, you can be a dangerous psychopath and still have good taste in music.

Updated Saturday, May 3, 2014, 2:11 PM
As you may have gathered from the above mention of the dangerous psychopath with whom I spent more time than most parenting experts would recommend, not everything about my childhood was super peachy keen. One of the things that wasn't all that great was that I lived in a trailer in a clearing in the middle of the fucking woods in the middle of god-damned nowhere, NH. It was really special. Not everyone hates that kind of thing. A lot of people in my family just love it. I don't hold that against them. But it's not my thing.

I live in the city, Brooklyn for now, and I love it. I lived in Philly for a short while (too short a while) and I really loved it there too. And someday I may end up living in Boston. I've been advised by counsel I'll probably love that too. I'm a city kid, which is odd seeing as I spent a decent chunk of my formative years living in the aforementioned empty howling wilderness.

BUT... there are good memories of living on the north end of the eastern tip of the middle of the forsaken goddamn backcountry. One of them is of this album. We lived in this clearing in the woods. There were not a whole lot of neighbors and the ones there were were thoroughly terrified of the wild-eyed maniac my mom was making time with. So he and my mom just cranked the stereo as loud as they fucking wanted, which was fucking loud.

It all came back to me just now. We've got the windows open in our apartment. The sun is streaming in. Amy was sitting on the couch and I was laying with my head in her lap. The last track on side one, my favorite on the album, "Stranger in a Strange Land" came on. And it all came streaming back. I remember being outside in the sun, surrounded by the green, and hearing Leon Russell echoing back at me off the trees. It was a nice little memory from a rough time in a hard place.

I still prefer the hustle and bustle of the city to the lonely isolation of the bleak wind-stripped tree-filled purgatory I grew up in. But there are still people I love living up there. And not every single second of it was pure torture. So it's got that going for it.

[wikipedia]