Forgotten Treasure: Donnie & Joe Emerson “Baby” (1979)
Before all else, let’s just take a minute to mourn the bygone era of gold medallions, home-cooked slow jams, and matching Elvis jumpsuits.
Donnie and Joe Emerson were teenagers when they put together Dreamin’ Wild. Two brothers, playing and consuming and recording and breathing music, living away from the city, on a farm. Their story is not unusual in any way, yet somehow, that specific combination of experience proves peculiar to the ears. Donnie and Joe’s music is so eerily reflective of the young adult experience, so bare to the bones with sincerity and careful hesitation, that adulthood seems contrived in comparison. Theirs is the sound of ambivalence towards growing up, a sound that gets drowned out much too often.
It is so easy to shrug off adolescence as a time of general naiveté. “You’ll know once you get older,” as the saying goes. Adolescence, though, is a transient period and a turbulent one in which everybody is forced to be vulnerable in spite of themselves. And so the real burden of life lies here, in the form of terrible head-versus-heart contradictions, within these formative years. It is human to be uncertain. Teenagers brave it everyday.
From this emerges the clearest expressions of the heart and soul, whether out of love or angst or otherwise, that no adult could possibly replicate. Grown-ups like to worship perfection, and tend to overthink everything. Baby is what came before all that.
Donnie & Joe Emerson - Baby (1979)Buy Link (via Light In the Attic)
Brilliant video from Light In The Attic
Read more about Donnie and Joe here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/garden/touring-the-farm-where-the-emerson-brothers-recorded-their-1979-album.html?pagewanted=all
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