I spent the 80s in purple

Prince died today, at the age of 57. Coming on the heels of the deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey already this year, I didn’t think there would be any more meaningful musical deaths for some time. Apparently I was wrong in that belief. This one really left me stunned. The high school I attended

Don’t you forget about me

There’s a Chicago radio station that I don’t much listen to, but they’re having an 80s-themed weekend. I’ve written about 80s music before, because music mattered to me more in that decade than it ever had before, and more than it ever has since. And I doubt I’m the only one who’s like that, either.

Rainy night in the city

I’ve written about Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” before. It’s one of those songs from the 1980s that takes me back to another time in my life. I wouldn’t relive high school for all the money in the world, but the music from that era can always make me think about

There’s so many things that I wanna say

Today, as I was eating at a Five Guys restaurant in suburban Chicago, I heard some bits of a song by a band called The Outfield. Their biggest hit back in the 80s was “Your Love” and this sometimes gets them labelled as a one-hit wonder. But I like one of the opening lines of

Closer to me

One of the benefits, if that’s the right word, of a long commute home in the evening is the chance to listen to some music along the way. This evening, for example, I found an old Def Leppard CD and put it in the CD player to make the Kennedy Expressway more tolerable. And as

I know this much is true

At the end of a long day at work today, I faced the prospect of a long commute to get home. It always seems like getting to work takes 15 minutes in the morning, and getting home takes an hour in the evening. Some of that is psychological–does anybody look forward to work more than