If you’ve downloaded this month’s free mp3 from my new CD, thanks! If you’ve not, and you’re anti-free-stuff, okay. I can’t relate, but okay. Anyway, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the song, “Moment of Youth.”
I’m a Brit-junkie. I think it started when I was a kid and watched every freakin’ minute of “Brideshead Revisited” on PBS. I couldn’t get enough of it. Being a poor kid from the south, England was about as fantastic a place as I could imagine. I never fathomed speaking anything other than English, so I dared not dream of foreign language countries. (I was a kid, yo.) Watching “Brideshead” only deepened my belief that I would go there someday. To England.
Anyhoo, a few years ago I was watching “The Graham Norton Show” and he did a segment called “Moment of Youth.” It was clearly a play on the phrase “moment of truth,” but it was original to me and I liked the way it sounded. I wrote the three words down in my notebook and forgot about it.
At some point, I went looking through that notebook for inspiration and landed on those scribbled words. I gave myself an assignment to write to a title and that was it. The first line is the only part of the song I actually lived. “I was catching a plane to nowhere” is based on my years as a flight attendant. There were a lot of flights that felt like that. I don’t even remember all the places I’ve been. Landing for a turn-around is easily forgettable. But honestly, I’ve had layovers in towns whose names escape me. That’s what I wanted to capture in the beginning of that song – the experience of getting on a plane and not being entirely sure where it’s headed. And not really caring, either.
I love “Moment of Youth.” I love the track and I love what the song means to me. With each passing day of this blessed life, I can see that many, many chapters of what has gone before fall squarely into that title. And I suppose that’s as it should be. I pray I never completely lose moments of youth.