Composing : The Memory Songbook: melody shapes us by Douglas Glenn Clark

I'd turned the TV on while I was finishing my work day. Television is like the radio for me. I turn it on when I want to be in the company of voices and music -- a community. Then it happened. I heard a musical intro to what I assumed was a commercial. I'd heard it many times before and it had always made me pause. The commercial is about automobiles but uses a timeless unrequited love between a young man and woman -- soul mates -- as its theme. It was the music that lured me to the commercial the first time; and it is the music that continues to stop me in my tracks. "These songs are the roots of who I am musically." -- Neil Young There is only one captain on Neil Young's ship. He goes his own way when creating new music projects. "A Letter Home" is more proof. Some might call this group of songs "covers." But not Neil. His decision to record songs by Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and others is not just a collection of favorites. Rather, these songs have shaped him emotionally as he grew from youth to maturity. In a Los Angeles Times story by Randy Lewis Young discussed how the songs on his new album affected his own decades-long career of writing and performing original material. It took several months to hone his final list. The songs were recorded in three days. I wrote a novel called The Memory Songbook in an attempt to capture the cultural phenomenon that very few people can avoid. Rich and famous, middle class or poor, we all experience songs at first as a revelation, and then later as salvation. Music is memory ... and love ... and survival. But, composers, it is not just songs that touch us so deeply. Whoever wrote the soundtrack for that commercial I love so much --- you too belong in my memory songbook.