One of the major turning points in my life was when I stopped listening to my dad’s music. At the age of seven, with two older brothers shoveling grunge, metal and punk into my eardrums, my music tastes switched drastically. I can only imagine how annoying I was, whining in the back seat about the 60s mixtape flowing out of the car speakers — “This sucks! This is corny! Don’t you know Eddie Vedder is the new Paul McCartney?” One of the bands whose cheesiness I would trash was The Moody Blues. To my ears they epitomized everything that was uncool about parents.
But a few weeks ago, in a moment of boredom and curiosity, I decided to give The Moody Blues another, slightly more mature, listen. Full of groundbreaking innovation, In Search of the Lost Chord is a perfectly executed concept album before prog epics were a dime a dozen. Space-age trips outs run parallel to catchy hooks and the band encapsulates the late 60s as a time of experimentation, navel-gazing and psychedelia. I now recognize the band as yet another great I was born too late to enjoy or fully understand. So, it’s true that parents aren’t always wrong — sometimes it just takes you fifteen years to realize it.
