Old Enough to Forget

I bought this album for my dad because it was supposed to be a "jazz" album. I thought he'd like it ... maybe he did, maybe he didn't. He did, though, keep it, and recently when my mum was packing up her place to move, she asked me to go through the records and I should take anything I wanted. Years earlier, when dad was still alive, he'd let me pillage his collection and I "borrowed" quite a few classics from early Ray Charles to Harry Belafonte, and those albums would be lost on my watch. So I went through again and picked out a bunch of stuff, mostly stuff I'd given him over the years and a few old gospel albums that looked interesting. It's kind of weird listening to More Than a Feeling now after all this time and recognizing bits and pieces of songs I'd not heard in decades. I don't think I played this more than a few times back in the early '80s, but not heard it since. What drew me to the band were the players. I'd seen gu...

Back in the early '80s I started to listen to Christian music, and the pickings were pretty slim. The number of artists I really liked I could count on one hand. Keith Green was a piano-playing singer who dropped his first "Christian" album in 1977. He'd release a couple of albums with label support before being overcome with the desire to go all in on his vision of ministry, to the point where he felt he couldn't charge for his albums. So he did the unthinkable. He put his money where his mouth was, and he made an album his way. Then said (I'm liberally paraphrasing here), "I'll send it to you if you want it. If you want to send a love offering that would be nice, but if you can't that's cool too." A couple of my friends had his earlier albums and they liked them ... I never did get them. But I did send a gift (can't remember how much, but it was about what I'd have paid), and sure enough, a little while later the album arrived. ...