Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Day I Was Born



On three of his four albums, APL uses musical 'interludes' between songs, some of which are purely brief instrumental recordings, while others incorporate an audio recording of one of our family members, taken from our family achive of audio and video tapes which I've collected and digitized over the years.


Mama, Nathan, and Adam
  The very first example of this is the first track on Apple Blossom, entitled 'The Day I Was Born'. (An appropriate way to begin your very first album, I would say--with an announcement of your birth, actually made the day you were born by your mother!) After Adam's birth, on November 18, 1982, his mother Mary Beth and I got out our cheap little cassette tape recorder that we had brought along with us to Children's Hospital in Buffalo, New York, so that we could make a recording to take back to Little Valley, NY (where we were living at the time). Our first born, Nathan, was two and a half years old, and Mary Beth wanted him to hear her voice so that he wouldn't be worried, and so she could prepare him for what was coming with her when she came home!

Somehow we managed to keep track of that and a number of other cassette recordings for over 20 years in a little shoebox, when I began to digitize them via computer and then make them available to our children. (I did the same with our VHS video recordings.) Hence Adam had access to a number of these historical family recordings when he began to compose his first album and incorporated a number of them into his songs, as either prelude or postlude.

Hence his Apple Blossom album became a very personal and intimate family portrait. In fact, the very title comes from a recording (video) of me saying something like, "spring day...blossoms are out on everything," as I'm videorecording the blossoms in the yard (track five). I think you can imagine how shocked I was to be included this way in my son's first album.


On the Highlands (NC) Parsonage Deck
 But that's APL for you. We Lindquists are a tight bunch, and family means a lot to us. So I suppose it wasn't surprising that that would come out very clearly in Adam's artistry.  His music is an expression of his soul, if I may put it that way. And (speaking as his father, who has known him 'since the day he was born') a beautiful, well-grounded, and loving soul it is.

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