One of the albums that I most disliked hearing in the family apartment as a child was Judy Collins' Colors Of The Day. I had always thought of it as being one of my mother's albums, I surmise now that it must have been chosen by my father, as I don't believe my mother had very much interest in music at that time. Really, I never thought of my mother as really being particularly interested in anything, though she was probably invested in a great many things, as are we all.
Back to that album. Released on May 8th, 1972, when I was eight and a half years old, it was really boring to me at that age, and full of a kind of an emotional heaviness that I was not able to understand, nor was I prepared to. Though many decades have passed, I can still regress to that hurt, but I've become more open to the feelings associated with it. The sadness and melancholic introspection which so turned me off to that particular record are some of the very things that I enjoy most about it now.
So it is that when the opening notes of the first song on the album start playing (the country styled "Someday Soon"), I often find myself psychically transported back to the wood-floored living room of my childhood, this while sitting in my car in San Francisco nearly three thousand miles and forty five years away. It often feels perfectly, and strangely natural.
While much of what I listen to from my childhood and adolescent years is music that I have ambivalent feelings about (especially the top forty music, which I rarely enjoy since then), Colors Of The Day is a recording which has really undergone a complete metamorphosis in my mind. Although I'm pretty sure that it's my attitudes and tastes which have changed, it's almost as if the music itself has. Perhaps I'm just able to hear it differently now.
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