It was a gift I didn’t request, didn’t really want, but received on Christmas, 1985. When I finally slipped the album out of the cover just after New Year’s and a day before meeting up with the person who gave it to me, I just wanted to be familiar enough with the songs to prove that I’d actually listened to it. But there was something about Brothers In Arms that kept me playing it over and over again. Walk of Life and Money for Nothing were instant favorites, but it’s the title song that haunts. I’d seen enough of pain, loss, and death to realize how little I knew of pain, loss, and death. Listening to Brothers In Arms, I understood the Vale of Tears, the Shadow of the Valley of Death in a whole new way – Biblical imagery wed to life. And that we cause the suffering and death ourselves far too often.

For this one song, it would be on my top ten list…but the rest of the album is amazing, too.

Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, Vertigo Records, AIR Salem, Montserrat and Power Station (NYC),1985

It’s only 34 minutes long, put out in the beginning of 1963 by Impulse!Records. Every time I listen to it, I hear something new – or I understand something emerging that I hadn’t before. Not one note feels forced in this conversation, and there’s almost an inevitability to one note following another. How is it that the living give-and-take of jazz can feel almost predetermined? It’s a musical mystery.

It makes me wonder about all the many choices that brought me to this point in life – the where of it, the ones I call family and friends, and all the other particulars that would not have been the same had my life taken a different road on this life’s journey. If I hadn’t, then there wouldn’t be…What would the particulars of this life I call mine be? If you hadn’t, then there wouldn’t be…Fill in your own answers.

Had Duke Ellington and John Coltrane recorded a different take on all seven of these songs, I’m sure it would still be on this top ten list: the spirit would be the same even if the particulars within the frame of the songs weren’t. I’m inclined to think the same is true of life in general.

Still, I’m grateful that the years God has granted me have brought these particulars.

I was five years old when it was released in 1969, too young to realize its genius. And way too young to know how difficult it is to create something beautiful, meaningful, or tuneful when disagreements threaten friendships and working relationships both. The four of them went on to do more, but there was no reunion tour. The sum was greater than the measure of its parts – brilliant parts though they were.

It makes me wonder what beauty might come out of other difficult things…

What is your favorite from the Fab Four?

Abbey Road, The Beatles, Released September 26, 1969, Apple Records

There is no pain. Do you think you can tell heaven from hell? All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall. Pink Floyd lyrics are amazing, but add the music and they are mesmerizing. Existential angst and a peek at the darkness that lives inside every human heart shoot through the music and I greet them. Their presence within me is released, if only for the few minutes between opening chords and final notes. They are true to life, a truth that sitcoms and Hallmark movies do their best to deny or cover up.

But they aren’t the only truths, nor the deepest ones. They aren’t the final word, nor are they the ultimate narrative of a life well and deeply lived. In the end, it’s love and a benediction that close the book of life. Amen.

Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd – on the top ten: