As I’ve already said, my experience with Melanie, other than the few hits she had on the radio in the ’70s, is entirely within the context of the pandemic, having picked up nearly all these records on jaunts to Matones up in Collegeville when we just desperately needed to get out of the house, but it still wasn’t safe to gather anywhere. The grocery store was the destination, and the record store happened to be nearby, and if it wasn’t crowded, I’d go in and rifle through the new offerings and the $5 bins. So I’m listening to these records in a time of trauma, finding them very comforting but having to admit that I can’t think of them objectively outside of the pandemic experience. It could be that once we’re out of this, if we ever are, I won’t want to hear any of the things that I clung to during those darkest days. Sometimes the things that give us the greatest comfort also bear too much of the memory of what we’ve been through.
As an example: there was some very specific music that we listened to in a very heavy rotation during both pregnancies. In particular, Nanci Griffith’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” an incredible album by any measure, was on play at all times in those winter months as we waited for our first-born to come. I associate it so strongly with that time, with our feelings, with all the incredible emotions tied up in making that leap into parenthood, that today, I can hardly listen to it. The association is just too strong – I can’t hear it without those feelings and many more coming up.
There was other music we used in that time that was almost transient – we loved it during the pregnancies, it served purposes for calming or breathing or pain relief, and afterward we hardly ever – or never – played it again. A disc of R. Carlos Nakai’s Native American flute songs, “Desert Dance,” falls into that category – it was beautiful and useful, but so specific and so far outside our normal musical range that I don’t believe I’ve played it in nearly 30 years. Here, too, I wouldn’t be able to hear it without becoming 32 and on the brink of parenthood again.
So will I continue to listen to these Melanie records? Only time will tell.
This 1972 release was her first on her own label, after leaving the Buddah Group, and while it lacks the singles and quirky covers she was known for, it also lacks the goofy songs that can be a little off-putting if you’re not in the mood for them. No odes to animal crackers or beetles here. Just super solid ’70s singer-songwriter type stuff.
And this one also featured quite a bit of packaging – unique album cover construction, meant to hold in a series of color photographs suitable for framing. An elaborate package, as you can see:
