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On The List: Bowerbirds

Bowerbirds live and write music in an Airstream trailer in the woods of North Carolina and their debut album, Hymns for a Dark Horse, beautifully reflects this organic lifestyle. Beth, Mark and Phil share with us the music of their childhood--a time when they had electricity and MTV.

Music We Grew Up With

We decided to make a list of our favorite songs when we were young, or as we were growing up - songs from our youth. All of these songs are accompanied in our minds by memories of what we were into at the time we first heard them, and we thought it would be fun for us to revisit our young selves.

Beth Tacular: Tracks 1 - 7
Mark Paulson: Tracks 8 - 12
Phil Moore: Tracks 13 - 20

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Tracks

1. Cyndi Lauper - Time After Time

When I was little, the only TV shows my parents let me watch were The Disney Channel and Channel 4, which had Sesame Street on it. But mostly I wasn't allowed to watch TV, because they wanted me to do "something productive." I'm really glad for that now, because I spent a lot of time outside or inside making things, but at the time, I really wanted to watch the cool TV shows other kids were surely watching. Finally, a new babysitter let me watch MTV, and the very first music video I saw was Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time."

I was totally mesmerized. I remember there being a bus at the end the video, with Cyndi looking out wistfully. I liked how it was sort of bittersweet. At the time, I was about eight years old, but I was already feeling very nostalgic for my "childhood," and this song only intensified that feeling. I'm not sure if the eighties were just really melodrama-laden, or if I was just a weird kid.

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2. Tears for Fears - Shout

Later, I saw this video on MTV, and I was instantly in love with everyone in the band. Those boys were really cute and tough-looking to second grade me. I spent a lot of time at the pool as a kid, and I remember strutting around the pool, feeling like an angry bad-ass, singing this song in my head.

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3. A Ha - Take On Me

"Take on Me" is another song I first discovered on MTV, and if you have ever seen this video with the real life action and the neon animation combined, you know why I liked it so much. It was great to dance around to and pretend I was the girl in the video and Morton Harket was in love with me. I was really boy crazy in elementary school. I remember singing this song while daydreaming about Gabe Perotta, my off and on curly-haired boyfriend from first to fourth grade.

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4. U2 - With Or Without You

Gabe broke up with me in fourth grade, by giving me a note that said, "Hey pal, you're dumped." He told me to wait until I got home to open it. His friend Tim had actually written the letter for him, and I think he felt guilty about it later. I opened it at home and cried on the back porch. "With or Without You" became my mourning song for our lost love. I couldn't live with or without the suddenly-turned-mean Gabe Perotta.

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5. Madonna - Live To Tell

Madonna is a genius, and this is my favorite of her songs. I love her voice-- so silky and coming from her belly. This song, which I listened to a lot in middle school, while dancing alone in my bedroom, in front of the mirror, with lots of spins and leaps, reminds me of being a hopeless and isolated twelve year old.

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6. Simon and Garfunkel - April Comes She Will

Here's another melodramatic song I liked in seventh grade. The line, "the autumn winds blow chilly and cold," was particularly poignant to me then. I remember lying on my bed, gazing longingly off to one side, my eyes not quite focusing on my horse and posters, my purple journal at my side, pink pen in hand, and wishing I was riding a horse across golden fields in Switzerland, while leaves fell around me, as I mourned my lost lover.

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7. U2 - Van Diemen's Land

I think I wanted to make out with the Edge, just because of his voice. U2 had been one of my very favorite bands since fourth grade, but when I heard Van Diemen's Land, from Rattle and Hum, in early high school, it was a new gloomy song to add to the soundtrack to my life. I liked how intense the guys from U2 were, and I thought they had sexy voices. I had a mix tape that included, like, seven U2 songs, and I used to play it when my dates and I parked the car and made out by old playgrounds. This song is simple, but sounds sort of Irish, and sort of Joanna Newsom-y to me now, for some reason.

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8. Various Artists - Ghostbusters - Ray Parker Jr.

This was the first tape I ever got, and I played it in my first three button battery powered tape player. It's the first time I remember being able to choose music on my own to listen to. My first best friend Andy Britten and I would do laps on the monkeybars on the swingset while this blared, over and over, beneath our feet.

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9. The Mamas & The Papas - California Dreamin'

Phil's parents played the Beatles in the car. Mine played the Beach Boys. I'm still jealous. Anyway, this is the first song I remember that evoked feelings within me other that making me want to run around in circles. It helped that I usually heard it when my parents played it while driving from Iowa to Michigan in the winter, but it always made me feel weird and melancholy, and still does.

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10. Van Halen - One Foot Out The Door

I remember this not because I liked the song, although I was a huge Van Halen fan, but that the song contained the phrase "Son-of-a-bitch", and I was so petrified that my parents might hear me playing it, I took a magnet and erased that section of the tape. My friend Wes ridiculed me to no end for also inadvertently removing about three seconds from "Mean Streets", the bitchin' first track from Side A. I think it may have been his tape. Sorry dude!

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11. Mr. Bungle - Squeeze Me Macaroni

After spending middle school listening to Kiss, Aerosmith and Van Halen, this record blew my early adolescent mind. It was also my first exposure to John Zorn, and was probably the first time I really started thinking about album production. It seemed like the weirdest music in the world (besides Schoenburg), and this track, with its extended, graphic food/sex metaphor, seemed by far the most ridiculous.

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12. Lush - Fantasy

My ultimate go-to break-up song in high school. I felt like none of my friends really liked this record, at least not like I did, and I played it incessantly, alone. Always alone...

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13. Mickey Mouse - Disco Mickey Mouse

After my dad would jump rope in our living room to the American Graffiti Soundtrack, My sister and I would put on the Mickey Mouse Disco album and bounce around doing that thing where you point, John Travolta style, while the record skipped continuously.

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14. Various Artists - It's The Hard-Knock Life

My sister and I would leave our doors open while this album spun almost every night before bed and this song would get me more excited than sleepy but I wouldn't dare let my parents know that. It was our favorite musical. "We love you Miss Hanagen."

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15. The Beatles - Back In The U.S.S.R.

I actually loved every song off of every Beatles record and still pretty much do. My friend, Wes Phillips, would come home with me from school when we were in the first grade and we would play these albums from my dad's collection. I remember being the most fascinated by The White Album. The songs were crazy and then there were full sized pictures of the Beatles looking shaggy and crazy and I don't remember seeing anybody like that in real life.

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16. Kenny Rogers - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town

My parents would put this album on the record player when I was really young. My dad would sing along with Kenny's lines, but usually only on the part when he'd sing in that restrained voice, "don't take your love to town." I didn't realize what the song was about at the time, but I knew it made me feel grown up.

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17. Paul Simon - The Boy In The Bubble

Even though I want to sample that introductory accordion part and put a more awesome beat with it, this song still comes from one of my favorite albums of all time. The production is somewhat cheese ball, but I still love it.

My family spent an amazing day at Año Nuevo Sate Reserve with the sea elephants on the California Cost and my dad and I took a different car into San Francisco that evening from my sister and mom. Our friend, Mr. Cosec was driving and he threw Paul Simon's Graceland into the tape player as we drove through the hills on highway 92.

I remember the lyrics being strung together in the weirdest and most magical ways I'd ever heard and I thought at the time that there was a lot that I might never understand. "It was a dry wind and it swept across the desert and it curled into the circle of birth. And the dead sand, falling on the children the mothers and the fathers and the automatic earth." Best trip ever. It was the summer after the second grade for me.

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18. Madonna - Papa Don't Preach

My friend, Dave McClelland, and I would set up a string of pillows in the basement and jump from one pillow to the next, hot lava style, and eventually save Madonna from impending doom. Dave and I would hang out at family potlucks throughout our child hoods but this I remember happening around third grade.

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19. Don Henley - The Boys Of Summer

Skip ahead to early puberty. I hated this song. Even today whenever I hear this song it reminds me of the day when I was sitting in my parents car feeling particularly heart broken after Sara Rutherford dumped me while my parents went grocery shopping. Fifth grade threw me for a loop. I'm still amazed at what an awful feeling this song leaves me with after I hear it. Don Henley has always been an insensitive prick, if you ask me.

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20. Van Halen - Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love

Finally, Phil came of age. When I got into Van Halen, there was no turning back. I was totally hooked and I remember hearing it for the first time on Mark's front steps with his older brother Sean in seventh grade as we raked leaves into the backyard to be burned.

This was also the first song I learned how to play on guitar. Mark taught me. He already knew how to play most of Metallica's Master of Puppets. Totally awesome.

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