Sounds Of Love

David Lannan and Sounds of Love I met David Lannan in 1984, my sophomore year at The University of Oklahoma. He was cleaning swimming pools and singing and managing the entertainment at a little bar and restaurant on Campus Corner in Norman called Another Roadside Attraction. I heard his voice pouring out of the door of the Attraction while I was walking down White Street one evening. When I stepped inside to listen, he saw my guitar and invited me up to play with him. That was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until his death at age 71, due to lymphoma, in February of 2009. Over the course of 25 years we spent a lot of time hanging out, playing music, and amusing each other with a dark, ironic sense of humor that we shared. I have a wealth of vivid memories from those days, but the hours I passed just sitting and listening to the man's voice and guitar bounce off the walls of my rental apartment and echo across the fields from the porch of his house in the country as he sang his traveling songs remain among the most powerful of my life. David never considered himself a musician per se. As great a singer and guitar player as he was (ever struggling to improve his, I believe, beautiful guitar accompaniment) he was correct in one important way. A pure folksinger in the tradition of fellow Okie Woody Guthrie and pre-electrified Bob Dylan, music was simply his most effective vehicle for communicating a message. His lyrics touch upon themes of true love lost, the reality of the spirit, the holiness of nature, empathy for those who suffer misfortune, and the wisdom of the Golden Rule. He makes you laugh at the folly of taking yourself, and himself, too seriously as well. And most importantly, upon listening to him sing I am confident that even the most hardened cynics will agree with the title of the 1970 Rolling Stone article: David Lannan Really Means It. In March of 2013, a very close friend of David's, Joseph Graham, emailed me, writing that he had a box of cassettes of David Lannan recordings that he wanted me to have. This made me very happy. I remembered that throughout the 1980's, David had periodically recorded in small local studios in Norman, laying down guitar/vocal demos of songs he had penned over the years, along with a few covers of old songs that he enjoyed singing. He planned to use them to restart a professional music career which he had abandoned when he traveled to India in 1971, a destination he felt drawn to as part of lifelong spiritual quest, instead of touring to support an album recorded in Nashville the same year. Copies of some of the demos that I had carried around with me and listened to over and over had disappeared in moves over the preceding two decades. Among Joe's cassettes, I hoped, would be those recordings, long given up for lost. After picking up the tapes from Joe, I bought a used cassette deck, plugged in some headphones and started to listen. The tracks I remembered were there, but there were many more that I had never heard, much of it beautifully recorded and preserved, one stunning performance followed by another. In total, there were 65 separate tracks, most of which neither I nor any more than a handful of people, I am certain, had ever listened to or had any knowledge of. Sounds of Love is a compilation of these lost recordings of this great folksinger, poet and friend. Ben Blankenship August 2013.