I played the guitar as a young man. I had reached a point where I could pick and strum like someone capable of mastering the instrument. By age ten, my teacher, Vito Spioto, had me playing Paganini Caprices, although they were abridged versions. Anyway, I had discovered a fondness for classical music, and when I wasn’t playing what an old Italian virtuoso set before me, I had made quite a meal of the Lennon and McCarthy catalog.
Then, one day, my dad came home with a piece of sheet music. He wanted me to play it for him. I refused. Why? Aside from seeing a parent’s musical appetite as the domain of people too old to bother with, I was a snotty and defiant kid. Days passed, and I took my guitar and my dad’s sheet music to the basement when I knew he wasn’t home or had any chance of walking in. The notes went straight to my heart like no song I had ever heard before. Jim Webb wrote it. Glen Campbell recorded it. The song is called Wichita Lineman. My father has been gone for seven years. I have aged accordingly. But Wichita Lineman remains as fresh and poignant as when a reluctant boy took his guitar to an empty basement.
Many song lyrics have stuck with me, especially ones with imaginative opening lines. Once upon a decade, Three Dog Night opened a song with the exclamatory lyric “Jerimiah was a bullfrog!” Nirvana once offered up the much more subdued and somewhat mumbled lyric “Sell the kids for food.”
There’s one particular song—I can’t declare it my all-time favorite—that I must listen to all the way through; I won’t exit a vehicle until it’s through playing. It doesn’t have the catchiest or most imaginative melody or dazzling harmony. What it has is a soul. So if I had to choose one song to place inside a time capsule, in the event that we, through some cataclysm, lose the American ethos and a thousand years later wish to piece it together, the song would be Don McLean’s American Pie.
Michael's Corner 
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