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You are here: Home / Music / Somewhere in my youth or childhood

Somewhere in my youth or childhood

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I heard the Lauryn Hill song “Every Ghetto, Every City” while I was riding the train yesterday and it got me thinking: what’s the best song ever about looking back on childhood? I’ll go with “I Wish” by Stevie Wonder, but I also like the Van Morrison song “Take Me Back” (especially the whacked out version JLL does in “Georgia”, as awful as it is). What else is good?

Please, don’t mention that Nickelback song “Photograph”, not even as a joke. There’s nothing funny about an existential threat.

Reader Interactions

144Comments

  13. 13.

    red dog

    Harry Belafonte’s “Man Piaba”. “when I was a lad just three foot three, certain questions occurred to me”.
    Was recorded sometime in the mid ’50s.

  15. 15.

    Nicole

    @red dog: I. Love. That. Song. Since I was five years old (we had his Live at Carnegie Hall on 8-track). Though I didn’t get the full hilarity then.

  16. 16.

    Matthew Reid Krell

    Careful now, Rick Santorum has accused Obama of being a Nickelback fan. So all us Obots need to line up behind the President.

  17. 17.

    Yutsano

    @Southern Beale: That’s it. I’m sending Bnut on a mission after you. And no one tickles like a Marine. Yer in trouble now lady! :)

    (Dammit, doing a half-shift at work but I’ll try to stay in touch as much as I can.)

  19. 19.

    Nicole

    @Southern Beale:

    A song about looking back on childhood? Can’t believe nobody mentioned “Butterfly Kisses.”

    I believe the topic was “songs about looking back on childhood” not “songs about a parent’s repressed pedophilia/incest.”

  34. 34.

    Raven

    Beeswing RT

    I was nineteen when I came to town, they called it the Summer of Love
    They were burning babies, burning flags. The hawks against the doves
    I took a job in the steamie down on Cauldrum Street
    And I fell in love with a laundry girl who was working next to me
    Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
    So fine a breath of wind might blow her away
    She was a lost child, oh she was running wild
    She said “As long as there’s no price on love, I’ll stay.
    And you wouldn’t want me any other way”

  38. 38.

    eemom

    @c u n d gulag:

    Have you ever heard The Kingston Trio’s version of “A Very Good Year”? It’s hauntingly beautiful, vastly better than Sinatra’s overorchestrated schmaltz. Unfortunately I can’t find a video.

  39. 39.

    DougJ, Head of Infidelity

    Paradise by the Dashboard Light.

    Ain’t no doubt about it, we were doubly blessed.

  40. 40.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    Please, don’t mention that Nickelback song “Photograph”, not even as a joke. There’s nothing funny about an existential threat.

    Really, you’re doing a thread about songs, and you’re doing the “make sure it’s only songs I might like” thing? I just don’t understand why people do that with music. I would say it’s a get off my lawn thing, but people of all ages do it, and yet no one agrees on what singers fit into it.

    And yes, I happen to like the Nickelback song, though it makes me think of my brother more than me. As for me, I try not to think about my childhood except for when I need to tell my kids about walking to school uphill in the snow. A movie about me going back to my childhood would consist of me screaming for two hours.

  43. 43.

    Mnemosyne

    Slightly different, but I think “We’re Going to Be Friends” is a great song about being a child.

    Also, site redesign problem: I can read the mobile site on my new iPod Touch, but opening comments crashes it. I can switch to the main site and read comments that way, but the type is miniscule. Please fix.

  47. 47.

    Raven

    Nanci

    So Long Ago

    You’d gone off to fight the war when
    I returned from school
    I traded in my innocence when the
    Springtime came to bloom
    I married for my family… one night
    I dreamed of you
    And you were running from me in
    The rain down on Congress Avenue

    Where did we go?
    That long ago?
    So long ago

  57. 57.

    Raven

    @eemom:

    Nanci Griffith
    Drive-In Movies And Dashboard Lights

    Mother can’t you hear your daughter crying
    Father wake up her youth is dying
    Her kids are grown… Husband’s gone away
    It’s a shame cuz she had such a lovely face
    Can’t you see she needed more
    Than, “Oh, what a pretty child”?
    You never taught her truth from lie
    All you told her was to smile
    In Texas back in sixty-nine
    It was drive-in movies and dashboard lights

  58. 58.

    eemom

    re Paradise By The Dashboard Light, I’ve always thought they should just play that in HS sex ed classes and “abstinence” would teach itself.

  59. 59.

    West of the Cascades

    @eemom: This. Puff pretty much sums up childhood innocence and its loss in adulthood. Probably no sadder song, either.

  65. 65.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @DougJ, Head of Infidelity: I’ll find ways to work around it unless you fix the so-pill-m problem as well.

    Most of their music is kind of repetitive, but that one album was decent, and that song was pretty good. And it did fit some people I know: I wanted to relive the old days, but it seems everyone has moved on.

    And anyway, there are stations around here – Dallas – where the best thing on is Bruno Mars.

  67. 67.

    John PM

    Everclear – My daddy gave me a name (then he walked away). I love this song because the melody is so upbeat but the lyrics are a downer. I listener to it a lot before I realized what they were saying.

  71. 71.

    RSA

    Paul Simon, Kodachrome. (Wikipedia says that his original title was “Going Home”, but that wasn’t interesting enough.)

  77. 77.

    gaz

    Just please don’t mention Nickelback ever.

    The only reason they are still around is people won’t shut up about them

    News flash: They fucking suck. In fact they’ve always sucked. And always will suck. And if you think they don’t suck then that is because YOU suck.

  82. 82.

    gaz

    I don’t really look back on my youth with any sort of fondness.

    It was hell.

    So I guess I’d have to say maybe ummm. Prison Sex by tool*?

    * I don’t actually like tool. Maynard is pedo, I just know it.

  83. 83.

    punkdavid

    I’ve been racking my brain for great songs about childhood, but mostly coming up with songs about youth (high school, young adulthood).

    Sugar Mountain – Neil Young
    The Circle Game – Joni Mitchell (which she wrote after hearing Sugar Mountain)
    4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) – Bruce Springsteen

  85. 85.

    Arclite

    My folks were Little Feat fans, so I loved “Fat man in the bathtub” (cuz that was funny to an 8 year old) and “Rocket in my Pocket” (loving spaceships, and being too young to catch any innuendo).

    And I agree with @Mark H: Kodachrome and that whole Paul Simon solo album was awesome.

    Oh, and the Star Wars theme, of course.

  91. 91.

    Robert Green

    @John PM: in addition to that everclear song, a GREAT song by a TERRIBLE band,
    i give you similarly crappy Blink 182’s magnum opus Stay TOgether For the Kids:

    t’s hard to wake up, when the shades have been pulled shut
    This house is haunted, it’s so pathetic, it makes no sense at all
    I’m ripe with things to say, the words rot and fall away
    What stupid poem could fix this home, I’d read it every day

    So here’s your holiday,
    hope you enjoy it this time, you gave it all away
    it was mine, so when you’re dead and gone
    will you remember this night, twenty years now lost,
    it’s not right.

    Their anger hurts my ears, been running strong for seven years
    Rather then fix the problems, they never solve them, it makes no sense at all
    I see them everyday, we get along so why can’t they?
    If this is what he wants, and it’s what she wants, then why is there so much pain?

  92. 92.

    dedc79

    Basically every song by the Hold Steady,but for starters: Massive Nights, Stevie Nix, Little Hoodrat Friend. Admittedly more focused on the teenage portion of childhood

    That’s the Way – Led Zeppelin

  94. 94.

    c u n d gulag

    @eemom:
    Oh, I forgot!

    I have a lot of their albums, since I’m a big Folk Music fan.
    Frank, I have on cassette.
    And, sadly, my record player broke, so I haven’t played them, or a lot of others, in years…

  99. 99.

    RSA

    Surrender, by Cheap Trick, isn’t really a nice look back on childhood, but it’s pretty funny.

  101. 101.

    gbear

    I’ll go with ‘I Know Love Is All I Need’ by Rodney Crowell. That whole album, The Houston Kid is one of the best records about childhood and growing up that I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. Just a marvelous marvelous album.

  103. 103.

    Donut

    @Robert Green:

    An awful lot of kids will look back on Blink182 as their intro to rock. Taste is what it is and there’s no accounting for it, as the cliche goes, but there’s nothing wrong with kids liking the Blink back in the day.

    —

    Back to the point, when I first heard Green Day’s “Jesus of Suburbia,” in a lot of respects it rang pretty true for me, as a kid eho grew up in the same era.

  104. 104.

    Nicole

    I confess to weeping my eyes out listening to “Shades of Grey” by the Monkees. I also confess, I was 14 at the time.

  109. 109.

    wrb

    not a happy one but

    Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

    which caused me to think of

    Red Dirt Girl Emmy Lou

    My Little Town Simon and Garfunkel

    Hickory Wind The Byrds/Gram Parsons

    In South Carolina
    there’re many tall pines
    I remember the oak trees
    that we used to climb

    But now when I’m lonesome
    I always pretend
    I’m getting the feel
    Of hickory wind

  113. 113.

    PurpleGirl

    Gee, nobody commented on the post title.

    (Somewhere in my Youth or Childhood was a ditty composed for the movie “Sound of Music” as a story bridge. It wasn’t in the song book of the play, as I remember it.)

  115. 115.

    FreeAtLast

    For looking back on your children’s childhood, I love
    Harry Belafontes’s Turn Around (Giving my age away, I know)

  118. 118.

    Marcellus Shale, Public Dick

    @Donut:

    ironically blink 182 was when i realized i was getting old.

    i could have sworn the first time i heard “all the small things” that they mentioned then purdue quarterback drew brees. i know it sounds preposterous looking back on it, but after kid rock and puff daddy had just foisted their garbage on the culture at large, i didn’t imagine anything was too absurd.

  122. 122.

    Bob Munck

    @punkdavid:

    The Circle Game – Joni Mitchell (which she wrote after hearing Sugar Mountain)

    Also, according to Tom Rush, because a friend of hers had just turned 20.

    “So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
    Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
    There’ll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
    Before the last revolving year is through”

    She sent it to Tom on a cassette, apologizing to him for what bad shape it was in. He pointed out at the Birchmere last weekend that that boy is now 68.

  124. 124.

    Kyle

    Smoky Mountain Memories and Coat of Many Colors by Dolly Parton. Mary Margaret by Nanci Griffith.

  130. 130.

    zonker

    The Kinks “No More Looking Back” or “The First Time We Fall in Love”, I first heard those songs when I was in high school and absolutely adored them. I was such a strange little hillbilly.

  132. 132.

    Kathleen

    @eemom: Agreed. Sinatra mentioned on a documentary that he was inspired to record the song because of the Trio.

  133. 133.

    Groucho48

    Roy Clark
    “Yesterday When I Was Young”

    “Yesterday when I was young
    the taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue.
    I teased at life as if it were a foolish g ame,
    the way the evening breeze may tease a candle fl ame.
    The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned
    I always built alas on weak and shifting sand.”

    Rod Stewart
    “Every Picture Tells A Story”

    “Spent some time feelin’ inferior
    standing in front of my mirror
    Combed my hair in a thousand ways
    but I came out looking just the same”

  134. 134.

    kuvasz

    gotta’ go with the Boss. Growing Up.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dy7RTicVr0

    I stood stone-like at midnight suspended in my masquerade
    I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade
    I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch
    I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and come out with my soul untouched
    I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd but when they said “Sit down,” I stood up.

  135. 135.

    kth

    “Strawberry Fields Forever”, Beatles

    “Thirteen”, Big Star

    “Helpless”, Neil Young (also “I Am a Child”, but that one’s not as good as “Helpless” or “Sugar Mountain”)

    “Rock N Roll”, Velvet Underground

  136. 136.

    kth

    also Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting For a Train” and Tom T. Hall’s “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died”, but it’s a pretty slippery slope from those songs to Walter Brennan’s “Old Rivers” (which I don’t hate but wouldn’t try to defend).

  137. 137.

    Ben Cisco (mobile)

    These always remind me of childhood:

    “Saturday In The Park”, Chicago
    “Horse With No Name”, America
    “Maybe Tomorrow”, The Jackson Five
    “Summer Madness” , Kool and the Gang
    “Goodbye Stranger”, Supertramp

    I was a weird kid.

  139. 139.

    Anton Sirius

    I hate Nickelback as much as the next guy, but the people claiming Seasons In The Sun is a good song should probably be imprisoned, as they represent a clear danger to the public. That monstrosity is a blight upon our collective unconscious.

    It’s also a song about how bittersweet it is to die or some shite like that, not a song reminiscing about childhood. It’s like saying Send In the Clowns is also about childhood because you went to the circus that one time.

    Unmentioned actually great songs about childhood: Tori Amos has some fantastic ones, particularly Winter and Icicle. Arcade Fire’s Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels) is a pretty brilliant take on kid’s fantasy lives too.

  143. 143.

    Robert

    “The Saturday Boy” by Billy Bragg.

    At Schoolkids Records in Ann Arbor in 1986, Billy Bragg told me I was “too cheery to be socialist.” I wish he could see me now.

  144. 144.

    punkdavid

    @Bob Munck:

    I don’t know who the friend who turned 20 may have been, but Neil Young claims to have written Sugar Mountain on his birthday (Im think he says 19, but the evidence is that it was actually his 20th) and at the time of his 20th birthday in November 1965, he was staying with Joni and her husband.

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