This Old Dad

Saturday morning the Bad Company song Early in the Morning from the album Desolation Albums came on my mix. Whenever I hear this song, I instantly fall into a trance and start playing it on repeat. After I got my fix, I started playing all of Bad Company's albums through their 6th, Rough Diamonds. Even though I know their catalog pretty well, I always seem to underestimate how much the music will move me and how solid all of the early albums sound. Desolation Angels came out in March 1979--right at the end of 8th grade for me. Of course, I'd heard Bad Company all over AM and FM radio before 8th grade, but I still hadn't added one of their albums to my growing collection. After being mesmerized by Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy on the radio, I splurged, got the album, and nearly wore it out. A couple of months later, I'd collected a haul of cash, checks, and savings bonds at my 8th-grade graduation party. Back then it was pretty common to give savings bonds as graduation

 I've been playing with creating and sharing playlists that I create in my YouTube Music account. I can either share in YouTube Music or regular YouTube--I don't really know which is a better experience for different devices or circumstances. Please drop a comment and let me know which works better for you! For some reason, Journey popped into my head today, so I put on their 1979 album Evolution, and it sent me down the rabbit hole. Before I started, I guessed that I'd find 30 songs that I'd consider worthy of making my Favorites list. That's a lot of great music.  As a comparison, earlier in the week, I started another playlist for a slightly earlier band--also in the Hall of Fame--that I really love. I couldn't get past 18 songs without getting into 'this is pretty interesting' vs. 'this kicks ass' territory. So I was kind of surprised that I ended up with 40 Journey songs that made the great music list. That comes to over 2 hours and 30 minut