by Jim Croce
~ How long to retain lyrics in your head? ~
My parents were fans of Jim Croce, and it’s funny how listening to a lot of his songs while riding around in the back seat for several years can be enough to permanently imprint the lyrics onto your brain. Croce was a masterful storyteller, and an impressive acoustic guitar player in a coffeehouse style that wouldn’t become widely popular for another 2 decades after his death. But without a bunch of over-produced orchestration, he created masterpiece slices of 3-1/2-minute radio pop goodness that even 4+ decades later you can still sing along with every word to a song you haven’t heard in 15 years, as though you’re still just a kid cruising around in the car with mom & dad.