Heads & Tales - Harry Chapin
Track List:
Could You Put Your Light On, Please
Greyhound
Everybody’s Lonely
Sometime, Somewhere Wife
Empty
Taxi
Any Old Kind of Day
Dogtown
Same Sad Singer
I was a teenager the first time I recall hearing Harry Chapin
Greatest Stories Live. 14 stories that probably mean more to me than any other album. Not because they are the greatest songs ever recorded or anything like that. Less than a decade after I first heard the live album I found myself a father at 20, married to the mother of my child who was also young. We were poor. I worked full time, she stayed home with our son. It was 2008 by this time and we were living in a 2 bedroom trailer. We didn’t have any TV other than a few DVDs that I didn’t have any real interest in. We didn’t have internet other than mobile internet on our phones. I spent time throwing darts and playing guitar. I would spend hours trying to play various Chapin songs. I did try to learn some that weren’t on Greatest Stories Live. I would sometimes not know a song, the first one I can think of is “Dance Band On The Titanic”. I would use part of my lunch at work to look up the song to hear how it goes and then try to play it later. This was the first time I encountered Chapin’s studio work and it was so much different than his live stuff. Instead of diving into it I avoided it and sought out his live performances when I could.
Recently I’ve been playing guitar again. I still play more Chapin than anyone else. But I thought that with my maturity over the past 16 years maybe I would appreciate his studio work. Why not start the second half of the year with 9 albums made one of the people who inspires me to pick up a guitar.
This album was mostly new to me. I’m familiar with Taxi and I’ve heard Everybody’s Lonely before. I was honestly a bit surprised at how familiar this album felt. The songs are overwhelmingly Chapin. I would say that I felt this album is very narrow in scope. I get this was the start of his career and he hadn’t developed a range yet. A lot of songs felt very similar to Taxi. I did note that Greyhound actually seems like it may have been partially reworked into Bananas.
I plan on listening to the remaining albums Chapin released in release order over the next week or so. I hope to find a few new songs to learn to play. I may try to learn Everybody’s Lonely off of this one.
