How old are you?

I'm 49.

When I was 15 Black Sabbath released "Master of Reality".
The same year I bought "Deep Purple in Rock". Two years later
I saw Humble Pie live at Buxton (England) and Thin Lizzy in London.
(Etc.)

Man, guess if I had some great years, being a teenager!

And then, last year... just when I was giving up all hope of ever getting to hear some REALLY great new music... my son (24) told me to listen to Opeth.

I just started to laugh and got goose pimples - I felt like 18 again...

(Yes, Opeth is a really great band!)
 
43
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That means approximately 20 more years of exposure to music than most here, and music has always been as crucial to my quality of life as food and sleep. I have three teenage children. My oldest son intoduced our family to Opeth about five years ago. Since both of my sons are also musicians, we endlessly marvel at, and attempt to dissect Opeth's compositional theme, structure, transitions, dissonance, crescendos, technical and instrumental difficulty, complexity/simplicity and most especially percussion. You can listen to any given Opeth song a hundred times and hear something new in it -- they're just that good; it's depressing really. I'm certain that Opeth will be regarded by the future music historians as one of the most important and innovative "rock/metal" bands in rock's relatively short history. Unfortunately, they may suffer the same fate as other musical giants like Mozart; they won't be fully appreciated universally accepted until they're dead or very old. It's a shame what the industry has done to music in this country. I cannot imagine there wil be a day (like there was when I was young) that a 12 minute song would be played on the radio.
Thank God for the internet.