A Life in (Album) Review: Bruce Hornsby

Day the Third: I'm running through my ten most influential albums, thanks to the recommendation by my high school buddy, Matthew Wilhite. I'll continue my trek with an album that really demonstrates a lot about what "high school JD" was all about--and what that guy would turn into in the years to come.

Autumn 1986. Sophomore year. Like most other 80s children with little taste, I had felt my heart leap to Air Supply; I thought Phil Collins was cool; I liked Weird Al Yankovic. In other words, I had little taste of my own.

Autumn 1986 was also the season in which I took my final piano lesson. My valediction at my final recital was the first two movements of Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique." I was and will always be proud of that accomplishment. I was beginning to play by ear, and my keyboarding future could have gone anywhere.

Into this period of my life, ripe for change, burst Bruce Hornsby and the Range and their classic debut album, "The Way It Is." The album, arising in the gap between Michael Jackson's two biggest albums (Thriller and Bad) and just before the rise of Whitney Houston, held such a different sound, it took radio by storm that winter and brought Hornsby a best new artist Grammy in 1987.

I was drawn to Hornsby--as I was to Elton John--because he was a pianist who also sang. I had taken piano lessons most of my life; I loved singing. These artists combined the two skills, and they looked and sounded really cool doing it. I bought sheet music for the album, trying to learn Hornsby's notes. It was too hard. I realized that I'd never match the notes, I would have to match the style.

So I looked above the notes on the sheet music for the chords, and I followed them, learning to branch out and add twists of my own. I loved Hornsby's use of drone notes (playing the same low note on phrases that riffed on the same chord), and I figured out how to take a basic chord pattern and riff or jam with it until it was something uniquely my own. Hornsby wasn't a ticket into country-style rock, but beyond that into jazz and, eventually, bluegrass.

While Hornsby's style carried the day, the album had a huge influence on me beyond the keyboard. The title cut, with its outrage over Reagan-era indifference to injustice, confronted my conservatism at the time (I was a huge Reagan-Bush guy before I studied outside the United States and got a little more perspective).

In a time when little kisses first became a huge part of my life, "Every Little Kiss" captured my feelings, while "Down the Road Tonight" hinted at sin and the kind of things that weren't discussed at a Christian high school.

But my favorite songs were the lyrical landscapes of lesser tracks like "River Runs Low," "On the Western Skyline," and "The Red Plains." I was reading novels on my own (they weren't assigned in my high school), and I was really deep into John Steinbeck, whose books evoked the landscape of the Dust Bowl (Grapes of Wrath) and northern California (Of Mice and Men, The Pastures of Heaven).

My mind was filling with exotic landscapes beyond the hills of southern Ohio or middle Tennessee, and my fingers were creating exotic new soundscapes on the keyboard post-Pathetique.

A few years later a "western skyline" would welcome me and Jenny as we drove through Black Jack Canyon from New Mexico into our first Arizona sunset, a "mandolin rain" would accompany my own strumming on the instrument, and I would seek to change "the way it is" as a teacher leader and educator in public schools.

"The Way It Is," looking back, is The Way It Would Be for me in so many unique ways that I could have never foretold in autumn 1986. I guess that makes it a pretty influential album!

A Life in (Album) Review: Alison Krauss

Day the Second: after my high school buddy, Matthew Wilhite, nominated me, I'm looking back at the albums that left the biggest mark on my life and my personal style.

Flash back to 1995. I had just embarked on the adventure of a lifetime--marriage to Jennifer George Dittes--and we had moved out to Superior, Arizona, far away from home, and we fashioned a remarkable life there: Jenny working at a regional health plan and me teaching English at Superior High School. Surrounded by a loving church and a fantastic community, we fit right in.

But there were things I missed. My first autumn in Superior, I remarked to my students how much I missed seeing the trees turn colors. A student (Brandon T as I remember it) told me, "Don't worry, Mr. Dittes, there's a tree up in Globe that's turning colors!" As I remember it, Globe was about 20 miles drive away.

I remember going to WalMart and seeing country music videos on the TVs in the electronics department. I was astonished by all the green I saw--grass, trees with leaves, weeds--before realizing that it was Tennessee I was seeing through desert-thirsty eyes.

Bluegrass arrived in my life at that time, led by Alison Krauss's remarkable collection, "Now That I've Found You." It was amazing. Krauss's pure soprano brought in a smooth pop echo without drowning out the pluck of the mandolin or the steel guitar in her band, Union Station. All the time I had lived in Tennessee, I had seldom listened to bluegrass. Now it was all I wanted to hear.

The big hit off the album was Krauss's remake of "When You Say Nothing at All," a smooth, mainstream look at a Keith Whitley song that had briefly charted on country radio. Her recording of "In the Palm of Your Hand" with the Cox family opened for me new ways to look at beloved old hymns. Bluegrass made the music feel real. The mandolin plucked as naturally as raindrops falling on a lake.

In the summer of 1996, I spent a month at a German-language course in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The Americans there were encouraged to teach a dance to the other students. I chose Krauss's "Oh Atlanta," and a Czech partner and I two-stepped the night away as others joined in. That summer I began arranging hymns to fit my newfound bluegrass sensibilities, spinning off versions of "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder" and "In the Sweet By and By" that I still enjoy playing to this day.

A year later, in the spring of 1997, the album's cover song, "Baby, Now that I've Found You," took on a new meaning for Jenny and me. As Jenny prepared to go to the hospital to have our first child, I compiled a soundtrack to ease her through labor. Krauss's album was well represented, and that "Baby..." of the title song turned about to be the lovely Ellie Dittes, born on May 22.

Eventually I learned enough about bluegrass to understand that there were no pianos in bluegrass bands. About ten years ago I picked up the mandolin and began plucking away at church. This instrument brings me a lot of joy, and it opens me to be able to play beloved bluegrass and folk songs wherever I wish to.

A Life in (Album) Review: Wang Chung

I'm transferring this over from Facebook, which is much harder to search than Blogger, in an effort to keep longer, more personal essays like this in circulation.

Day the first: I was nominated by a lifelong friend, Matthew Wilhite, to identify ten albums that had a real impact on me. Sure, I'll post the cover, but each of these albums reaches back into the past and provides interesting insights into how I became...me.

If you're not into long posts--or you care more about my affinity to firearms than my taste in music--please move along.

My eldest son, Owen, has spent the past three years building his knowledge of rock music and assembling a huge collection of CDs and vinyls. Being the methodical person he is, he began with the Beatles and has slowly worked his way into the 70s with Led Zeppelin and Simon & Garfunkel. As I write this, he is poised on the edge of the 80s, listening to Queen and early U2.

When I realized where his systematic study of rock history was leading last year, I told him, "Just let me know when you get to Wang Chung."

Did it make sense to him? Of course it didn't. I'm his dad. I was doing him a favor. God forbid I would have recommended Bruce Springsteen and ruined the E Street Band for him forever!

Why Wang Chung then? Well, it's true that I really liked them. I owned the Mosaic (1986) cassette, and I had the extended dance version of "Let's Go" on vinyl. It was cheap, synth-driven pop, perfect for the late-80s, with a clean sound. Sure, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" was the instant hit from the album, but "Let's Go" was my go-to song, a four-minute burst of Saturday night excitement that (in my mind) wasn't equaled until the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" more than 20 years later.

The teenaged poet in me loved the first ballad on the album, "Hypnotize." It chorused the starry-eyed view I had of girlfriends at the time, and the way it rhymed 'hypnotize' and 'mesmerize' just seemed cool at the time (sure seems cheesy). The other ballad, "Eyes of the Girl" also captures my teenybopper passions (I was 15 in 1986).

But beyond the songs, Wang Chung opened up a channel of rebellion for me, a fascination with BritPop that I shared with friends like Kristy Jones Clay and Lisa Matthews. There were so many other foreign bands that fascinated me, the way Wang Chung did: INXS, Simple Minds, Tears for Fears, A-Ha, and Roxette, to name a few.

In this way pop opened my eyes to a world far beyond Tennessee, a "World in Which We Live" (Mosaic's closing song) united by shared human values and a desire to seek social change.

Four years after the release of Wang Chung's Mosaic, I traveled to the UK for my sophomore year of college. While there I saw A-Ha in concert (I had already seen INXS in Nashville in 1988 with Lisa). I made friends from all over Europe and Africa, friends who are precious to me to this very day, along with ideas they introduced me to.

I eventually gained the global mindset that I had only glimpsed in my living room sessions with Wang Chung on the stereo, even if I outgrew the puppy love that amplified those songs in my 15-year-old mind.