Grati-Tuesday: James Yuill

On this Grati-Tuesday, I am reminded of how true the phrase "music is the soundtrack to our lives" is for me.  I have always loved music, but especially lyrics (it must be the writer in me).  I memorized Ice Ice Baby in the third grade (and still sing it occasionally at karaoke).  I also distinctly remember sitting at my desk at home when I was in about eighth grade writing out all the lyrics to "Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It."

Well, I should back up... First, I called the radio station every day after school for about two weeks asking them to play Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It on the radio so that I could tape it.  It's not that they didn't play the song... they played it A LOT, but I was never at home, in front of my stereo with the tape all cued up.  So, after I finally got that puppy on tape, I sat down, pen and paper in hand, and wrote out the lyrics.  It went a little like this:  Listen.  Stop the tape.  Frantically scribble lyrics.  Rewind the tape.  Listen again.  Check lyrics.  Rewind the tape.  Listen again while reading lyrics.  It took hours.  Especially that pig latin part.  Phew. But again, makes for some good karaoke at 27...

My best friend and I did the same thing during our freshman year of college with "We Didn't Start The Fire."  Only this time, we had used Napster to illegally download the song and burned it to a CD (which probably took an hour or so in and of itself).  Then played the song and paused and scribbled lyrics and played and paused and scribbled. 


Perhaps the We Didn't Start The Fire lyrics are a little more impressive than Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It... but somewhere along the way (probably around the same time I started hanging out in coffee shops and writing in my journal) it became less about knowing all the lyrics and more about what the lyrcis actually said.  It turned out these people had gone through some of the same "life" stuff I was going through and they wrote a song about it!  It was an incredible realization, and I quickly became obsessed.  Instead of deciding whether I liked a song based solely on its musicality (which of course, is also incredibly important), I would wait until I had heard the song enough times to know a majority of the lyrics, and then decide.  Same with artists.  If the artist had enough lyrically poignant songs, I became a fan.

And so it went.

Like a lot of people, I'm sure, I have songs or albums that remind me of a certain period of my life.  It makes listening to Pandora or my iPod on random somewhat nostalgic, and it's necessary every now and then to remind myself where I've been and how I got here.

James Yuill's album Movement In A Storm has been my soundtrack lately.  Not only do his lyrics give me goosebumps, but his sounds is also incredible.  Whether I'm running, driving, working, cooking... it's all I've been listening to, and I love it. 

Today, I am grateful for James Yuill.