Gettin' Sentimental

My junior year at NIU was one of the best times for me. I changed as a person quite a lot. The year was 2008 and man oh man did I start listening to good music that fall. Little did I know however was how much the music I listened to then would conjure so much emotion and good memories for me years later.

This was a time where I was by myself a lot, my brother and two other roommates all were dating and gone all the time. I had a blast by myself playing video games and watching movies but when I hit lows in the absence of my friends I decided to listen to music that I had been meaning to. At that time I had been a veteran of my other favorite bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steely Dan, and Chicago; I felt an urge to broaden my musical library from The Electric Light Orchestra (Known to me as ELO) and Iron Butterfly.

Now, last week I talked about some classical music that I have listened to a lot throughout the past year or so. That music is great however I grew up listening to classic rock and that genre of music makes up the bulk of what I listen to. I had been a fan of ELO ever since I was a child watching DTV's Monster Hits every Halloween which played Evil Woman.  For Iron Butterfly I had their self titled album in my truck in high school and I listened to that frequently. I rather enjoyed the spooky type sound of that album and was overjoyed to discover in the fall of 2008 that Iron Butterfly had multiple albums.

One day as I was alone I finally cranked up ELO 2 and the song Momma hit me. I thought the song was cool as hell and had a sound that I really hadn't heard before. At this point as I listened to songs written by Jeff Lynne who is on the right in the photo to the right I knew I loved this band a lot. To the left of Lynne is the drummer of ELO, Bev Bevan. I was smitten by their  awesomeness. These songs flowed through my head while in my apartment and through my commuting to and from class at the DeKalb campus.

I changed it up throughout the semester by expanding my mind with the acid heads known as Iron Butterfly. Like I said before I listened to the self titled album with a song that everybody knows IB by: In-a-gadda-da-vida. I feel like IB gets a bad rap because people really only know that song. I know they didn't have a string of hits or anything but still. I listened to two albums for the most part during this period. Heavy is from 1968 and Ball from 1969. Ball to me is the better of those two albums but there are some songs that still stick with me today from Heavy such as So-Lo and Fields of Sun. Top to bottom I love Ball. The feelings that that album creates for me is different than basically anything else I listen to. I'm not sure if anybody in the band knew what type of sound they were projecting or not but it has such a Halloween-y type sound. Halloween being my favorite day of the year influences this idea heavily. Songs like Real Fright are a testament to that Halloween sound. It helps that I listened to Ball a lot in October of 2008.

A lot of sentimental feelings hit me about a year ago. For the longest time I finally re-listened to both ELO and Iron Butterfly post college. When the song Belda Beast came on I was taken right back to that lonely apartment with myself for company. What hit me the most was how nostalgic I felt about that time in my life. I don't look back and feel bad about myself for being alone because shortly after that I would get out a whole hell of a lot more. It was a time in my life unlike any other, and maybe that's why I felt such srong nostalgia. All I had was class and that music then, I realized that as I laid in my bed and went through all my memories last year. Belda Beast is definitely one of those songs that will always take me back to the innocence of my life in 2008. To this day my favorite bands are still ELO and Iron Butterfly. I listen to them frequently along with CCR, Steely Dan and Led Zeppelin.

I'm not sure what the music that people listen to says about them; Iron Butterfly suggests I do acid and burn incense while wearing flowers in my hair and tie-die shirts. I don't so who knows. This music is the soundtrack of my life. I think about how I ended up listening to this music by being alone I realize that I really had to be alone in order to ever have listened to it. I wouldn't have listened while hanging with my roommates. I'm so glad because no matter what I do, whenever I hear these tunes I fall right back into pleasant memories tarnished by nothing.