“I’m always skeptical whenever anyone talks about their earliest memories. The mind is a funny thing and it likes to fill in mental gaps with experiences that may or may not have actually happened. You think you have vivid memories of your third birthday at the community pool, but then one day you’re looking through an old photo album and you realize all of your memories are just static photos that your brain animated.”
“The only reason I’m inclined to think my earliest memory actually did happen is for the very fact that there is no photo documentation and because it feels entirely too random to be made up. I must have been 4 years old. My parents spent a lot of time at church in those days and I would always be posted up in a child care room in the corner of the building.
My mom says that I was always drawn to music, wanting to obsessively watch the weather channel because I liked the music on the local update, or needing to listen to a very specific cassette tape every night in order to fall asleep. There was a Fischer Price record player in the child care room (I had a matching model with different records at home) and most days you could find me sitting next to it on the floor surrounded by all these vibrantly colorful plastic discs listening to the songs over and over again.
It’s still a mystery to me, and being a 4-year-old child I wasn’t exactly aware of the morality of ownership and theft, but as time went by I slowly became obsessed with one song in particular. The obsession grew to the point that I couldn’t bear to be apart from it any longer and I knew I had to make it mine. Looking back, there’s no way I would have had any practical way of covertly sneaking a disc out of the room, but somehow, being so overcome by the song I was moved to commit my original sin. I stole the record and brought it back to the safety of my room where I could listen to it whenever my heart desired.
My mom never did figure out that she was abiding a criminal and after a while I grew tired of the song and soon graduated to my family’s vinyl record collection. There I discovered classical music like Debussy and Tchaikovsky, weird “Christian” rock from the ’70s and miraculously Vangelis at the tender age of seven via the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire.
As I got older I transitioned to Radiohead, Bjork, Sigur Rós and eventually to the likes of Scott Walker, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Nick Cave et al. It was a love affair that continues to this day and I can’t help but wonder if it all traces back in some Freudian way to watching those plastic neon discs spin around while my mind swam into that beautiful childhood reverie of love and theft.”
—Daniel James
Canon Blue’s full length release Lasso Yo is in stores now via Temporary Residence—on vinyl.
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PHOTO: BRETT WARREN
