ROBERTA FLACK
First Take
1971 Canada pressing

I got into an interesting conversation with a friend of mine yesterday; one that drove me to pull this record out.

He had asked me “What song elicits the most emotional response in you? Do you have one of those? A song that just overwhelmingly takes you over any time you hear it?”.

As a matter of fact, I do.

It’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack.

One would assume it is related to my beautiful wife of almost 20 years, but no, it is not.

It’s a song that is heavily rooted in the birth of (& love for) my now teenage son.

It’s an achingly beautiful song that I loved LONG before he was born (I first heard it in the film The Best Of Times), but when my son arrived, the lyrics took on new meaning for me.
Oddly, it was also the first song I’d heard after he was born, and it transformed me forever.

Do any of you have a song like that?

#vinyl #vinylrecords #vinylcommunity #vinylcollection #retro #vintage #art #music

@TheVinylApe I have similar feelings about a very different song, Imperial Teen's "Butch" (from 𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘬, 1996). I'm not sure when I'd started listening to that album, but I think it was still pretty new to me in the late summer of 2002, when my daughter was born. For some reason, I latched onto the chorus ("Butch is pink & butch is blue / You like strawberries. I like you") as something to sing to her as I walked around with her head on my shoulder trying to soothe her to sleep.
@TheVinylApe It's a pretty weird song to associate with fatherhood, but that emotional memory is unbreakable now.

@donutage my son changed my life, dude.
I was a selfish, self-centred, self involved horrible alcoholic and drug addict for years.
The moment my son was born, that all changed.
The lyrics of that song cover everything I felt when I first looked at him.

That’s the thing with music.

We have zero control over how any of it will touch us.

100 people can hear the same song and get 100 different things from it.

It’s why I fell in love with it at such an early age.

@TheVinylApe Music is magical, for sure. And good on you for straightening out for your kid. 🦾
@donutage yeah. That was one family heirloom I wasn’t passing down to him, man.