Brooklyn Roads (1968) – Neil Diamond

There comes a day when one’s childhood seems to have transpired during an entirely different lifetime, a day when one is free to re-construct monuments from the shards of what at the time were perceived shortcomings. Neil Diamond pensively captures this moment of resolution in “Brooklyn Roads,” a rapt recollection of days spent struggling to find academic bearings in the midst of an overwhelming imagination that caused him to flounder at school. He recalls the scents and sounds of apartment life, the comfort of his father’s beard, the fantasies he would indulge to escape his life of mediocrity. Throughout, a somber brume of French horns, strings and melodica underscores the ebb of auld lang syne—as when one, upon awakening from a nap, gasps in the acute realization that death is certain, and the past, irretrievable. The mind reaches back to rummage for what the heart craves, perhaps finding vicarious consolation in the belief that Home still redeems the fanciful reveries of youth.

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See also "Shilo" (1968) – Neil Diamond.