What’s Hopper Been Listening To

 

Well, it’s been a weird year.

(!)

Brief musical background about Hopper:

I grew up in the late 70s and 80s on classic rock. Which is basically guitar rock from the late 60s to, oh, about 1981. During the 80s I listened to the 70s. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Rush, Yes, stuff like that. From 1986-96 I played in a couple of bands with no real success but we were always busy doing something. I got pulled into the grunge thing in 1991, the year my band had its most success, and listened to a lot of Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Kings X, stuff like that. Then, around 1998, bored with everything I was hearing on the radio, I took a ten-year deep dive into classical music, interspersed with smaller jaunts into jazz.

The past decade I’ve been generally uninspired musically. Nothing has grabbed me longer than a few weeks. For example, I’d get into Zappa and the Grateful Dead for a while, then Sinatra, then jazz fusion, then this, then that. Occasionally I’ll pick a composer at random and listen to a bunch of his stuff until I get bored again. And nothing fills the hole.

This year has been no exception. Didn’t really listen to much in the winter, especially when Covid Fear blanketed the nation. Then, around May, I spent a few weeks listening to and occasionally revisiting Return to Forever, Al DiMeola, Chick Correa, and other bastions of jazz fusion. Mostly during my walks and weightlifting workouts in the garage. That, I must admit, was quite enjoyable, and I still think fondly back on those recent, warm spring days.

Over the summer I made a little habit of listening to a 10-15 minute selection of music with the headphones on my iPhone, right before bed. It was mostly classical stuff, such as Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, Liszt tone poems, Wagner overtures, and composers I’d heard of over the years but never heard, so I’d pick something 10-15 minutes in length to listen to at random.

But then I got into something very niche – movie soundtracks. First it was Bernard Herrmann, who did all those classic 50s sci fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Journey to the Center of the Earth, as well as all those Ray Harryhausen flicks. (An interesting note about Journey is that the further the explorers descended beneath the surface of the earth, the lower the pitch of the notes in the score.) Herrmann also did Citizen Kane and North by Northwest.

Then I moved on the soundtracks composed by Elmer Bernstein (Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven) and Ennio Morricone (all those Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns). After listening to these three composers for nearly a month, I capped it off with the score to Watership Down, a childhood favorite, listened to over a couple of days.

That phase lasted from mid-July to mid-September. I didn’t listen to much until a couple of weeks ago when, after owning an iPhone for five years, one of my daughters taught me to make a Playlist. Whoa! The first thing I did was go full circle and create a 221-song, 19 hours and 8 minutes Playlist composed of my early listening staples: Led Zep, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Hendrix, Yes, Rush, Mountain (R.I.P. Leslie West). Now I listen to that while I walk, and I probably won’t exhaust it (i.e., hear the same song twice) until sometime near the end of January. That’s been my big thing during the last part of this insane year.

So, no big musical revelations, musical discoveries, in 2020. Really a subconscious-made-conscious decision to look backwards to better times, to the music of my youth, to the movies of my youth. And as such, I have to admit I quite enjoyed a musical year.