…according to Kurt. I never really understood the term, having gone to an 8-12 high school and not paying the slightest attention to Degrassi.

Anyhow — it was Saturday night and neither of us wanted to cook. We especially didn’t want pick another leftovers recipe for the Easter ham, a fifth of which is still laughing at us in our fridge.

So off we went down the hill to Domenico’s Italian restaurant, by our morning bus stop to work. We’ve lived in the Capitol Hill area since August and despite several recommendations from bank customers, had never tried it out. Too bad we hadn’t done this earlier. The pizza and tortellini soup we had was delicious! The pasta was super fresh, as if they made it minutes before serving it. There was also a big party going on for a girl’s 18th birthday, so we were treated to some guy’s bday present of singing tunes on his acoustic guitar. He was thankfully talented enough to be entertaining instead of annoying, and made the entire restaurant nostalgic of 1994-1995, when grunge/punk was all the rage. We spent our dinner trying to name all the songs he played, but couldn’t put our fingers on some.

The first thing we did when we got home was break out the ghettoblaster (yes, I just wrote that) and try to find those hard-to-name songs. Our CD collection had hard-baked dust all over it. Guess we hadn’t really bought any new stuff since Napster got popular (jazzfest buys being the exception). Kurt tried to convince me that Pearl Jam was a great band. Still not convinced.

Our musicfest took us from grunge to The Who to Lenny to a lot of James Brown! Too bad I lost my old copy of Jamiroquai’s first mainstream album…you know, the one with Virtual Insanity on it. What’s the name? Argh, hate it when that happens! Leanne, help me out here.

From this, realized that the biggest influence on my taste in music is, blegh: my dad. He had all these great vinyls that he’d play to me when I was real young, like Steely Dan, the Moody Blues, Loverboy, and some others that I could only lump into the “looks like the cover artist painted this while he was on an acid trip” category. He also liked to play me clips from his Cheech & Chong album. Should have clued me in to the kind of stuff he must have smoked in his heyday. But how was I to know that at the age of 6?

Then in high school, when we were doing backup vocals (him and me) and bass guitar (him) for a couple of bands, it was my dad that kept on introducing me to the artists that would in the future go well beyond the one-hit-wonder point. Particularly remember him raving about Sheryl Crow when All I Wanna Do was still being played in the “New Music” hour on Z95.3. We’d practice it as part of the band’s repertoire because he loved it so much. Then after we did a show somewhere, all of us would go down to the Davie strip at 3:30am for 99-cent pizza and talk about music and life. We would do this for a few years, when I was 14-16. Maybe it was a little pathetic that I shared those late-night experiences with my dad and his cronies, but strangely, it was one of the best parts of my adolescence. I don’t think he reads my blog often enough to see my posts about how I appreciate his impact on my life, so SSSSSHHH!!

Enough with the nostalgia and mush. I’ll be back again with more randomness.