Guilty Pleasures

For anyone younger than 55 this posting is going to be in a musical foreign language. For those of us older than 55, it’s going to be a nostalgic tour of guilty pleasure (not the R&B of my Funky Soul blog).

Mark and I acknowledged our guilty pleasures to each other when certain songs came on the oldies station in Albuquerque that we’d listen to in the car when we couldn’t get anything decent on any other stations. I don’t know if other people our age also refer to these songs as guilty pleasures, but they know what I mean. (I have to acknowledge here that our son Max, who is 22, knows all these songs, too; from us or the oldies station, or both?)

Terri, my friend from Santa Fe, originally from Philadelphia, does, too. Although five years younger than me she never misses a beat (or title) when it come to pop music. She must have been listening at age eight. We were going to go camping last weekend up above Chama but it poured rain and I couldn’t find a housesitter who I could possibly ask to clean up my demented dog Sammy’s poop every morning (that’s another blog waiting to be written). So she came up to El Valle and we hung out yakking about this and that, watching the U.S. Open (Serena trash talking the umpire over her penalty), and eating. On Sunday we went for a hike up the canyon and then treated ourselves to brunch at the Sugar Nymphs, Peñasco’s own gourmet restaurant whose owners I sometimes sell produce to and drink a lot of mojitos with.

I can’t remember (my recurring theme) how we got started on guilty pleasures, a term she hadn’t before used but a concept she knew well. I started out admitting that I liked a couple of songs that were definitely pop, not rock, but had catchy enough beats that despite the inane lyrics got my toes tapping. Then she asked, “What else,” and I thought, I’m really going to be embarrassed to admit another guilty pleasure is “Brandi”, by a band called Looking Glass (I had no idea who recorded Brandi, I Googled it as I wrote this, but I bet Mark would have known) about this bar waitress named Brandi who’s in love with a sailor who’s love is the sea, not Brandi. I was just about to admit it when Terri blurted out, “Brandi.” I shot out of my chair and jumped up and down with delight.

When we got home we immediately went to YouTube and started playing all our guilty pleasures. We started querying each other about all those questionable pop/rock icons who actually had a good song or two: Rod Stewart with Maggie May, of course. Cat Stevens? (For those of you who don’t know who Cat Stevens is he started off as kind of a folk rock singer, then became more known for his writing, and finally became Yusuf Islam when he converted.) I knew there was a song of his I liked, and Terri actually had it on iTunes, but the song, The First Cut is the Deepest, was covered by someone else (Rod Stewart, among others, I just Googled that, too). Anyway, this went on and on and segued into other songs we had that the other one had never heard, like Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer singing Redemption Song.

After Terri left I remembered another guilty pleasure and e-mailed her about this particular embarrassment: Lying Eyes by the Eagles. Everybody has probably heard of the Eagles—they’re still out there touring with the same band members they started out with, I think. But Lying Eyes? This doesn’t jive with my criteria that a bad lyric song can only be saved by a good beat, or an edge. It goes: “Late at night the big old house gets lonely, I guess every form of refuge has its price. It breaks her heart to think her love is only given to a man with hands as cold as ice.” Or something like that. But the chorus picks you up and carries you along: “You can’t hide your lying eyes. And your smile is a thin disguise. I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes.”

Ahhhh. It’s just one of those anomalies I have to accept. When I’m in the car, singing “Brandi, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be” at the top of my lungs, you just have to let it go and enjoy your guilty pleasures.