The music was released in the Eighties. I was young; a former lover from the Eighties visited me a year or two ago, after not seeing me for ten years, and kept saying in amazement, “You used to be so hot.”
I guess I’m not hot anymore, but I used to be. I was 30, (in 1988) and still couldn’t grasp that the hot young men who were willing to sleep with me were not doing it out of pity. I was so much more comfortable thinking of them pitying me rather than recognizing that they were actually just hot for my treasure trail—or even worse, acknowledging that they simply liked me. A lot. And when we were done with each other, and I was alone again, I would listen to the mellow Autumn light of Free Fall.
It was the music I went to sleep with before I was positive, and I still hold it close, now fifteen years after that test.
I fell in love with a boy named Christopher the year I worked on the Cape in 1989. He was beautiful, and taught himself piano, and what he played for me in Chatham that year was at least as good as anything David Lanz ever played anywhere. We knew we would never see each other again, and I sent Chris the album, Christofori’s Dream. In a note I sent with the cassette, I wrote, “This is the tape, you are the dream.”
He really was.
Now is about the right time for Lanz’s version of A Whiter Shade of Pale.