when you walked into our house in austin, a pretty small farmhouse now that i think about it, and hooked a right after entering, you found yourself in the living room. along the south wall were built-in shelving units for books, the TV, VHS, and a sliding door with holes on either end that housed the records. 
my dad is a huge proponent of the LP. among the beatles, carly simon, the last little unicorn, and other psychedelic covered records, the stars of the show were the neil diamond albums. 
even when we got our cassette player and the huge stack of time-life 50s tapes, my siblings and i still broke out the neil diamond albums, especially tap root, which included cracklin’ rosie, i am the lion, and the best song ever, soolaimon. i couldn’t tell you how many times we listened to that album, dancing around the living room. the only song that may have topped it might have been “wild goose,” and that’s only because we decided to run around in circles 500 times while the song played.
when we moved to new london, i’m not sure what happened, but our excellent record player bit the dust. it was a great player; you could stack 5 LPS on it and it would drop them as each record finished. it was a great player around christmas time, when we would play our time-life albums nonstop. for a short while, there was no record player in the house, and i think after enough cajoling and complaining about the CD version of time-life christmas music not being quite the same, my dad picked up another player. it only plays one album at a time, but the christmas albums are worth that.
anyway, back to neil.
i liked mr. diamond so much, i made sure to buy his greatest hits on CD when i moved out of the house for college. while i may have been embarrassed to admit to liking singers from that era back in gradeschool (seriously, nothing embarrassed me more than saying the beatles was my favorite band in 3rd grade – in 1987…), now i’m happy to say that yes, i listen to neil diamond.