{"id":6999,"date":"2026-04-29T12:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T19:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/?p=6999"},"modified":"2026-04-28T11:13:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T18:13:10","slug":"city-of-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2026\/04\/city-of-dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"City of dreams"},"content":{"rendered":" I have loved music all my life, and learned to play piano as a teenager.  When I got my McDonald\u2019s paycheck I would walk over to the music store to buys some albums. I made $3.75 an hour and the cassettes cost $10.  I touched them, lifting them up to see the names of the songs and taking a good long look at the album art.<br \/><br \/>I knew some of the artists, and there were more I hadn\u2019t heard. My one radio station I was permitted to listen to didn\u2019t play them all. That music store was a Christian bookstore. I walked past the Precious Moments figurines and the bible study books to get to the music section. I would usually buy two cassettes and sometimes splurge on a third.<br \/><br \/>On the way out, I would tear open the plastic cover to put it in my Walkman right away. The tunes! I\u2019d listen to each album, then drill down on the one I liked best and play it on repeat for days. The second album would get it\u2019s turn after I\u2019d sucked the marrow out of the first.<br \/><br \/>I sat on the brown carpet in my room, opening up the album insert. The lyrics were included in a long fold-out from the cassette case. The lyrics, the songwriters and the producers were read again and again.<br \/><br \/>And the city at the end was Nashville. The clues left for me to follow went there. My young heart imagined what it was like, and how I might sing my heart out there.<br \/><br \/>It\u2019s been a long time since I judged Amy Grant for being too worldly, but I landed in the Nashville airport last week. That dream came true at last. <br \/><br \/>Sort of.<br \/><br \/>Not as a singer, but as a writer. I had dreamed of writing as well, but I knew it was too big a dream. I had no idea what to do for that one.  <br \/><br \/>Music dreams had a city with a name.<br \/><br \/>A lot has changed. I\u2019ve learned so many things.<br \/><br \/>But I haven\u2019t stopped dreaming. People lined up to buy my book, I signed my name on the dream made real.<br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/><br \/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have loved music all my life, and learned to play piano as a teenager. When I got my McDonald\u2019s paycheck I would walk over to the music store to buys some albums. I made $3.75 an hour and the &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2026\/04\/city-of-dreams\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7000,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6999\/revisions\/7000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}