Bronwyn Green

Nostalgic Notes is a new feature we’ve decided to try out. Basically, every other month, we’ll be blogging about random things we’re nostalgic about. This month, it’s songs.

I love music. There are so many songs that bring back a sense of nostalgia. My mom used to sing us to sleep at night. My brother and I used to sing our much younger sibs to sleep on nights when our mom had to work, and I sang my own kids and daycare kids to sleep, too.

Interestingly enough, all these lullabies were what’s come to be known as Wildly Inappropriate Lullabies. 

Some WILs from my own childhood include: The entirety of Carole King’s Tapestry album (I can still probably sing that thing from beginning to end.) Carly Simon, Simon and Garfunkel, select Eagles songs, lots of Beatles songs, oh and there’s nothing like being sung to sleep to the cheery strains of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown or The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I’ve been feeling especially nostalgic about David Bowie, lately. Space Oddity was also a bedtime song, and I used to love hanging out with my Aunt Malita and her Bowie albums.

I’m pretty nostalgic about The Imperial March from Star Wars  mostly because one of Killian’s favorite things it the world was for me to sing the plot of Star Wars (yes, you read that right) to the tune of The Imperial March when I was putting her to bed. 

Shriekback’s Cradle Song still guts me. I don’t think a more perfect parenting song exists. (Though, Dar William’s The One Who Knows comes close.) Just listened to Cradle Song now…and am suddenly overcome by allergies. Yes. That’s it. Allergies.

Here it is…in case you’re feeling the need to blow your nose.

Oh…The Dance by Garth Brooks. I’m not a country music fan – not by a long shot. But this song has a special, gut-wrenching place in my heart because a friend of my brother’s played it at my nephew’s funeral, and it was really just kind of perfect in that way that only hideously sad things can be.

The music from Labyrinth, and weirdly, Muppet Treasure Island, will always bring on an unmitigated wave of wistfulness.

Sometimes, I feel a bit nostalgic when I hear any of the Guns ‘n Roses songs off Appetite for Destruction. I hated that album with an unholy passion because my brother played it incessantly. But then I moved 12 hours away from my family for about a year (pre-internet and cellphone days, people) and any time I heard one of those damn songs, I’d miss my brother like crazy. One night at a bar, Mr. Brownstone was playing, and I went into the bathroom to cry because I missed my brother so much. Pathetic, I know.

I’ll always have a special place in my heart for 80s British New Wave and Billy Joel. And my girls Dar Williams, Tori Amos, Ani Defranco, Tracy Chapman, and Lucy Kaplansky. And Counting Crows, Rusted Root, and Toad the Wet Sprocket tend to give me a case of the “wistfuls”, too.

I know there are more, but this is what’s popping into my head right now.

So what songs are you nostalgic about?

Be sure to check out the other bloggers’ lists, too.

Jessica

Kellie

Kris

Paige