Best of Opus 70 Liner Notes       

As a songwriter, I sometimes feel that every song is a love song. Jack’s Song is a love song to our daughter’s Golden Retriever who is my companion on morning walks when visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts. The walk takes us along the historic waterfront, through Brewster Gardens, by the grist mill at Jenney Pond and along Town Brook. The final leg of the walk is through Vine Hills Cemetery where there is plenty of room to let Jack off the leash. He doesn’t always treat the historic gravestone monuments with the utmost respect. The original title was Monumental Indignity but everyone who has heard it calls it Jack’s Song.

As New England expatriates living in Florida, we sometimes have to head out to a sports bar on Sunday afternoon in order to catch the Patriots football game. We discovered a ritualistic, if not spiritual, sense of place. Sunday Afternoon Mass comes out of that experience.

My songwriting catalog is called Opus 70 because I was well into my 60’s before I started writing songs and the subject matter for most is about getting older. We like to call it a “sideways look” at aging. Better to Be Seen Than Viewed is Opus 70: Number 1. The summer I wrote the lyrics, I did not have my guitar with me and I sent the song to Peter Lehndorff – a friend and experienced songwriter – to see if he might want to craft a suitable tune. He did.

As I grew older, I noticed that the medicine cabinet of my college days had somehow expanded. What was once a single bottle of aspirin – for the days when a little “hair of the dog” was not a suitable cure – had become a supply of prescription and over-the-counter meds that spilled out of the medicine cabinet into bathroom drawers and kitchen cupboards. Getting Old Medicine Cabinet Blues is my take on the phenomenon. Barbara plays the pill bottle on this one to add a little percussion.

Nana’s Song is just a love to the very special relationship that exists between grandmothers and grandchildren. My hope here is that there will be a line or a phrase that will resonate with both.

There is a longer story here which we sometimes share in concert, but Barbara’s parents eloped on a 1932 Indian Scout motorcycle. Her father Clarence, son of a Yuengling Brewery brewmaster, was bribed with the motorcycle as a means of keeping him from visiting his father’s native Germany. Barbara’s mother, Bonnie, met Clarence at a July 4th parade in Pottsville, Pennsylvania and, after a short romance and some complications detailed in the song, married him. The rest is history. A lot of it is in the song.

A few years ago, we were attending a songwriter showcase at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. One songwriter sang a beautiful love song that he had written for a well-known country singer and talked about how his beautiful wife was the inspiration. Barbara turned to me and made some crack about how I only wrote love songs about Golden Retrievers. Another Ten Years was a make-up song.

Baby Boomers are reaching the age when they have to start dealing with the reality of having spent a lifetime collecting stuff and what is going to become of it. The children and grandchildren, it turns out, aren’t always lining up to take it off their hands. The Kids Don’t Want Our Stuff is my take on that.

An Extra Dollar an Hour is a love song for hourly wage workers who are sometimes single mothers. It’s a love song for people who make just enough money to stay off public assistance but not enough to have an easy time raising a family. You may know someone like that. We do.

My father died when I was 15, about 10 days before Christmas. It made for a particularly difficult holiday that year and some of the feeling stuck with me over the years. The Gift is a love song for my father and other people who may have memories that complicate holiday cheer.

Barbara and I met singing in a church choir. Singing in a Church Choir is our story – in four verses and four chords wrapped around a favorite hymn – which may be more than you really want to know about us.

We met singing in a church choir in 1982. After three-plus decades together, we can acknowledge that it wasn’t always perfect harmony. There were moments of dissonance , too. I wrote 24 Hours Since My Last Confession to shed some light on that. It was a little heavy at first but then Barbara got involved in helping me arrange it as a dialogue duet that we have a lot of fun singing.

My brother and I had a contentious relationship in our later years. He was a fundamentalist Christian and my brand of Christianity wasn’t good enough for him. While his constant efforts to convert me were a conflict – and that is apparent in Ashes to Ashes – my affection for him was genuine and deep. Written a few years after his death, this is a love song for my brother.

It is not always possible to take a “sideways look” at aging. Some subjects – like dementia – do not lend themselves to a lighthearted approach. Barbara and I lived for a couple of years as caregivers after my mother had started a long and painful decline. The Lonely Place Inside is a love song for her and others who have experienced the slow loss of a loved one.

Growing up, we spent weeks during the summer on my grandparents’ farm in Gladys, Virginia just south and a little east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a charmed time of life and Tastes Like Summertime celebrates the charm of rural life for a city boy.

I spent some time as a newspaper editor and was aware that any research would show that our local weekly newspaper obituary section was the first thing readers wanted to see. It occurred to me at some point that way people read obituaries changes with aging. In Lieu of Flowers is a sideways look at reading the obit section.

When the kids were young we had an opportunity to take a winter vacation in Puerto Rico. It turned out that one of the kids had an almost incapacitating fear of flying. The parental advice at the time was that it was okay to be afraid of flying but one couldn’t go through life with a fear of living. Fear of Living is all of that parental advice in song form.

Blood Alone Don’t Make You Family is more parental/grandparental advice. It grows out of living in a time when blended families are the norm, not the exception and young people sometimes struggle – with or without a DNA test kit – to figure out exactly where they fit into the picture.

My second job out of the Air Force was writing for a weekly newspaper in New England. The editor, my mentor as a writer, thought I should learn to drink boilermakers with his working class friends on Saturday mornings. Shots & Beer Town is about that experience and equally an homage to Dan Callahan, the owner of the Irish pub which served as my schoolroom.

Thanks for listening.

--Mark & Barbara Johnston