Ten years ago, I had this idea. I wanted to mark my 40th birthday by writing something, and then – as I put it at the time – decided on 40 somethings. I compiled a list of 40 pieces of music which served as milestones in my life to that point, and wrote about them on the blog I kept at that time.
The original idea, I think, was for it to be a collection of 40 individual pieces of music, but that quickly fell by the wayside – many of the musicians or composers involved prompted more than one memory, and the whole thing got a bit free-form at times, which isn’t in itself a bad thing – it just evolved.
So, ten years on, I – of course – have the idea to do it all again. With ten more memories, naturally. This serves more than one purpose; as well as helping me take stock of half a century, and looking at how my musical landscape has (or probably hasn’t) changed in that time, it also will force me to actually do that ‘being a writer’ thing of actually, you know, writing. Every day, or as close to it as I can manage, since there will be some travel involved between now and October 19th, and I’d rather not write and coach at the same time if I can avoid it.
How is this helping with ‘Going Back?’ – well, I’ll be writing every day, which is important. Also, some of the people I sent Part 1 to might see this and be prodded into feeding back some of that feedback (Hi, Dave!), and we’re heading out of the summer, so there will be more writing time available. And I’ll use it for writing – honest.
How this will work: I’ve gone back over the original 40 memories, and I’ve added ten more. A couple of them probably should have been in the first 40, the rest are prompted by things that have happened in the last ten years. I’m working on the order things appear in – ten years ago, everything was random, I might well tweak the order a little this time round. I’ll also mostly stand by what I said last time out, although I reserve the right to embellish and explain if necessary. Where relevant, I’ll update the memories with things which have happened since 2002 – in some cases, that’s quite a significant amount; in others, the memories remain in aspic. Also, there’s a lot more information out there now than there was 10 years ago; research for this will throw up all sorts of interesting things, some of which I’ll share with you, you lucky people.
I’ll try to make it clear what’s old and what’s new, and I’ll definitely replace almost all of the links in the original with working links, mostly from YouTube. They’ll break again, but with any luck, not as quickly as the originals broke.
Oh, and if you use Google Chrome, may I recommend the inline YouTube extension? It will enhance your reading pleasure enormously, honest.