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Inheritance and Adaptation

One of the Soundtracks to My Life

By Scott C LillardPublished 10 months ago Updated 10 months ago 14 min read
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It’s difficult for me—as I imagine it would be difficult for any lover of music—to come up with a set playlist of perfect tunes to outline a soundtrack to my life. After all, we are so connected to the music that defines our human experience that choosing some of it to showcase as “important” invariably omits so much more that may be equally important. Of course, being a composer and sound engineer, I see the value in buckling down and making those cuts. Having a wide range of musical taste, I could give you the jazz version, classical version, punk version, music box arrangements of video game music version (not even kidding) of my life; I could give you countless combinations of the above and more. What’s more, it could refer to an aspect of my personality, a time in my life, or an overarching biographical soundtrack. I’m going to go with the full-on biography, which means it will be harder to choose the songs to represent the journey, but let’s see how it plays out!

Because this is a soundtrack, I should start it with something pretty but also upbeat that will grab the listener’s attention. I believe a good fit for this slot is the first classical piece I ever loved (well, technically baroque); a piece that got a rock and roll makeover around the time I was becoming very serious about electric guitar; a piece so eternally ubiquitous that I even witnessed a beautiful rendition of it for solo viola last weekend: Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Here’s a link to the upbeat rock version by Jerry C.

As a young child I was blessed to be exposed to a lot of the greats, particularly of rock and roll and country, but being a child, the first songs I remember having a deep influence on me were made especially for children. To be specific, Easy Going Day from the film “Follow That Bird” made me happy every time I heard it, and Paul MCCartney’s We All Stand Together from “Rupert and the Frog Song” inspired feelings in me that I could not yet recognize: longing for community/friendship chief among them. When I would begin writing my own music over a decade later, inspirations from these songs—both musically and lyrically—would surface in my art, as such inspiration often does, without my full awareness.

When I was still quite young, my older sister was diagnosed with leukemia. I understood very little about it, but somehow I grasped the concepts of illness and death much more thoroughly than other children my age. We were never particularly close, especially with her being so much older than me, but I used to watch Snoopy, Come Home, pretending that I was Snoopy and that my sister was his former owner, Lila, as Shelby Flint sang Lila’s Theme. While the song doesn’t always still remind me of my sister, it still freshly recalls the enormous feelings I had which were completely outside my ability to comprehend at such a young age. I think this experience helped inspire both my love of music that is melancholy, and my tendency to seek escape in happy happy madness.

Hailing from the latter category, Stand by R.E.M. became a staple of my listening portfolio when I was about seven years old, mostly on the car ride home from school. The lyrics resonated with me, but ironically, as it was about being present in the moment, while I myself was a bit of a space cadet. The song was catchy and I always associate it with being done with my responsibilities for the day, going home to play Zelda and hang out with my younger sister, who was not yet in school. This song would become a regular part of my life again, about fifteen years later, on a mix CD, driving home with my best friend after we’d finished jazz rehearsal. Meanwhile, back in 1989, I was obsessed with another song with a very different aesthetic to that of Stand, the main theme from the 1982 movie The Last Unicorn, performed by America, but composed by Jimmy Webb, who would later become one of my all-time favorite songwriters. In a way, I guess he already was. Having had to deal with strange circumstances of tragedy and the like at such a young age, emotional music hit me differently than it hit my friends. Explicitly, the song only speaks of the undying magic of a literal unicorn; implicitly, the lyrics and haunting harmonic palate speak of loneliness, loss, hope, beauty, fragility, resilience; I absorbed this emotional soup, warming and strengthening me once more in ways I could not know.

A few years after The Last Unicorn and Stand, when I was in fourth grade, my family lived in my grandmother’s house for a year. This is mostly because we were struggling financially; while I was aware of this reality, I was also aware that I was surrounded by love, and I look back on that year of my life, which seems so much longer when you’re living it, as one of the best. I got along well with my family, I had great friends, a great teacher, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was released, I had a butterfly net and terrarium that I would use to catch, observe and release various insects, and we maintained our own little veggie garden in the backyard, which had previously seemed such a foreign concept to me. During that year, Michael Jackson released the song Black or White. I am often made fun of for liking this song so much, and I suppose I can see why, but I love it sincerely, without irony or guilt. Whether or not it makes for an effective plea for racial harmony, the groove and melody of it refused to be shaken from my head, and it became the living soundtrack for what really was a wonderful time in my life.

This version of the soundtrack to my life completely omits a lot of music that is very dear to me, which inspired me to become a composer and, in some cases, to be a better person. As such, some of my formative years in taste-development are skimmed over, but I swear to you that, as an audio engineer, I can justify the validity of these cuts, even if they break my heart a little. So we’re skipping ahead four years (a long time when you’re a kid) to when I was thirteen and first heard Seal. Man, those harmonies, those basslines! These aspects of his music remain an inspiration to my own compositions to this day. I love so much of Seal’s music for so many reasons, but that first song, the immortal Kiss From A Rose, gets the spot.

Around the same time, as I was learning to play the trumpet, I became heavily involved in jazz, first at school, then, as the years went by, in professional settings. The very first big band piece I ever played in high school was an arrangement of Chick Corea’s Spain; I was also introduced to some of my other all-time favorites: Bob Curnow’s arrangement of The First Circle, Buddy Rich’s Channel One Suite, which have all stuck with me (it was difficult not to put some of these on the playlist), but my favorite standard is Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring, which is also just a really great representation of jazz trumpet, a tune that I studied hard when learning to swing and to improvise, and one that I teach my trumpet students to this day.

As my teenage years went on and I became more depressed, I found solace in music of moods at both ends of the spectrum. I spent time either listening to things like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings or “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Dare To Be Stupid. Nothing in between. Strangely enough, it was through Weird Al that I rediscovered my love of Jimmy Webb; I loved Al’s parody Jurassic Park so much that finally, one day, I went and found recordings of MacArthur Park; the original Richard Harris recording with full orchestra, and Jimmy’s own solo version. I found out that it’s often labeled as a bad, nonsensical and overlong song, and I can only imagine that it is done so by people who are both impatient and unreceptive to nuance. Even now, this song sometimes gets me teary-eyed; the feelings of nostalgia, loss, uncertainty, both abstract and explicit, are so poignant that it’s difficult for me to imagine somebody with a heart failing to empathize on at least some level.

Cibo Matto’s second album, Stereotype A, was a turning point for me regarding the music I would allow myself to listen to. My friend sort of forced the album on me and I’m so glad it happened, because the rock/hip-hop vibe of this album was so refreshing at the time. One of the first songs I ever competed stole a chord progression from one of the songs on this album, and my writing on the whole became more influenced by this aesthetic moving forward. Though there is so much greatness on this album, I’ll list just the first I fell in love with: Speechless.

I grew up on the Beatles. My parents always had them and others playing on the stereo at home, and I was very familiar with much of their discography. They haven’t been mentioned until now (except the McCartney tune near the beginning) because one tune in particular stands out for me—not necessarily my favorite Beatles tune, but it impacted me as a musician—and this impact did not occur until my senior year of high school. As a young trumpeter, listening to the solo in Penny Lane felt like looking up at Everest from its base, nervous at the prospect of the climb, but knowing I would. I transcribed the solo and practiced it on my normal trumpet every day, even though the solo was written for piccolo trumpet. Because of this, the first time I ever played a piccolo trumpet later that year, I played Penny Lane and it came out beautifully, as the range suits the instrument far better than a standard trumpet. It was at that moment that I thought I really could take myself seriously as a musician.

In my late teens, the game “Dance Dance Revolution” was becoming more and more popular. Songs from the game became regulars on my burned CDs (mp3 players weren’t quite a thing yet). A standout song from all of that was www.blondegirl by Jenny Rom. From the catchy beat, to the melodic ear-worm, to the strange broken English conversation at the beginning, my friends and I loved everything about this song, and it was often heard blasting through the streets of our hometown from my car.

Another artist I grew up listening to alongside the Beatles was Roy Orbison. He was an artist I definitely grew to appreciate more as I got older, and I didn’t think much of him when I was young. When I saw David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and experienced the haunting, a capella, Spanish-language version of Crying as performed by Rebekah del Rio, I was entranced. There was so much more to that song than I had ever considered before this point; I now had a new appreciation for the original tune, and I fell in love with the new Spanish version. A few years later, when I heard yet another arrangement of Llorando by Il Divo, I could only sit in sileve for a good minute after it finished. The song just reached into so many parts of my soul, from my Mexican heritage, to my love of well made four-part harmony, to my parents’ music pumping through the house in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Something about it even reaches farther back, to some form of regret, or guilt, or just emptiness, that was touched on many years prior with Snoopy, Come Home.

As I got older, more and more of what I listened to—even the happy stuff—had at least a pinch of melancholy to it. The music that means the most to me is the music that connects all human beings when we are at our most vulnerable. That being said, I have no idea what the words are to Hoppípolla by Sigur Rós because I don’t speak Icelandic. However, I feel that what is being conveyed musically is packed full of happiness and sadness, of hope and regret. The older one gets, the more one can appreciate how these pairs of opposites often come together; not only do they not contradict one another, they are often inseparable. And that, in its way, is beautiful.

In case this soundtrack doesn’t have enough sad tunes for you, here’s another—one that, like the others, has made a lasting impression upon me as a composer and as a person. It was in my early twenties that a friend first turned me on to Tom Waits. My wife can’t listen to him. She is a very skilled vocalist, and part of her skill comes from an ability whereby she can hear a vocalist singing in a certain way and feel in her own face and throat and diaphragm exactly what they’re doing. I understand this because, as a skilled and experienced trumpeter, I can feel a pretty close approximation of what other trumpeters are feeling in their lips, tongues, fingers, etc., just by listening to them play. So, Tom Waits’ rasp, sometimes taking on the aesthetic quality of dragging one’s face across unmaintained pavement, is not appealing to her at all. That being said, I am not so viscerally connected and can appreciate what he does to his voice from an instrumentalist’s perspective. Lucky, too, because Ruby’s Arms is one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s another tune I think I like more as I get older, but I probably would have loved it as a kid. I like not knowing the whole story; it almost makes the character’s departure sadder, like nothing had any meaning up until the end, and it is that end that matters. I don’t feel that way about my own life, but there are times when I did, and there are even times now when, though I don’t ever seriously consider just packing up and leaving my life behind, I certainly have a bit of this song going through me.

Since I opened with a rock version of a well known classical piece, I’ve got to begin my closing with a movement from my favorite symphony. Though I’m a huge fan of symphonies by Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bruckner, etc., it’s a twentieth century American composer who wrote my favorite of all time. Howard Hanson’s 2nd Symphony, dubbed his “Romantic” symphony, really is that exactly. It goes through the highs and lows of love, the dissonances and resolutions, the pain and the ecstasy. It has special meaning for my wife and me, and I think it’s powerful enough to have meaning for anybody who can feel the music. While I recommend listening to the whole symphony, it’s only the third movement I’ll list here, since it’s shorter and still packs a big punch. When the main “Interlochen” theme kicks in about 5:35 in, everything in my life seems to just fall into place, even if only for a moment.

I'm going to finish up with one exception to the “no video game music” trend of this version of the soundtrack of my life. The game itself is so wonderfully bizarre I won’t even try to explain it here, but a positively addictive piece from its soundtrack is a tune called Biker Chix. It’s one of those tunes everybody can sing along to because, while there are vocals, there are no words. Indeed, my daughter Beatrix would sing along to this song before she could speak, and it’s a recurring theme of our car rides. In fact, it should be noted that many of the tunes I’ve listed here are ones I’ve shared with my kids: I sang them to sleep with Lila’s Theme, watched Follow That Bird with them, sung Kiss From a Rose with them, played them Joy Spring on my trumpet; my mom has even done her job of saturating their existence with Roy Orbison and the Beatles when they visit my parents. It’s gotten me thinking about inheritance and how even somebody’s unique soundtrack, though personal, always has parts that are inherited. I hope at least one of my grandchildren will sing Biker Chix before he/she can speak.

Thus ends this version of the soundtrack of my life. I think I should go for the comedy version next time.

The Tracks

  1. Canon in D
  2. Easy Going Day
  3. We All Stand Together
  4. Lila's Theme
  5. Stand
  6. The Last Unicorn
  7. Black or White
  8. Kiss From A Rose
  9. Joy Spring
  10. MacArthur Park
  11. Speechless
  12. Penny Lane
  13. www.blondegirl
  14. Llorando
  15. Hoppipolla
  16. Ruby's Arms
  17. Howard Hanson, Symphony No. 2, Movement III
  18. Biker Chix

playlistpop cultureindieelectronicaclassical90s music80s music70s music60s music
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About the Creator

Scott C Lillard

Father, Husband, Physicist, Award-Winning Composer and Musician

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