For the past couple of years, one of my favorite albums has been Liege & Lief, one of two released in 1969 by Fairport Convention. The album consists of seven songs in forty minutes. Six of the songs are slightly modernized versions of classic folk songs from the British Isles. The only original sounds like it could have been a hit in Shakespeare’s day. I tend to listen to Liege and Lief several times a day for about a week straight, then put it away for a couple of months.

Confession: I am a huge music fan, but I have very few favorite albums. Every once in a while, I try to come up with my Desert Island List—which five, or ten, would I take with me to have on a desert island, presumably equipped with a totally kickin’ stereo? I really like A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, and Ágætis Byrjun by Sigur Ros, and I suppose I could make the case for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and my double-disc set of Bach’s solo cello pieces.

But I keep coming back to Liege & Lief, and I can’t figure out why. It was a ridiculously pretentious throwback of an album when it was released nearly forty years ago. Sandy Denny’s voice, best-known to normal people as the lady who sings harmony on Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore,” on the second side of the album with “Stairway to Heaven,” floats above cymbal flourishes, tinkly guitars, scratchy fiddles, and bouncing bass. She sings ancient-sounding songs (they probably are ancient) about foxes, cuckolded lords, roving minstrels, and village lunatics. She sings them all with what sounds like a perfectly straight face.

I am twenty-nine years old. I own a laptop, recording equipment, a website, and a car with anti-lock brakes. I use a MetroCard when I travel in New York, carry a cell phone, and haven’t used a film camera in years. I get my exercise in an air-conditioned room filled with machines that simulate farm work and feats of athleticism. I watch DVDs, love the U.S. Postal Service, and live in a house with a dishwasher that borders on sentience.

I am also drawn to old things. I am fascinated by photos of my ancestors taken in Poland and New York. The men have long beards and the women have penetrating eyes. The children in those pictures were long-dead before I was born. I always seek out pictures of older days in public places—restaurant photos of hundred-year-old sports teams, paintings of villages, framed newspaper accounts of disasters and celebrations.

Liege & Lief is a new thing safely packaged as a new thing, or perhaps the other way around. It hearkens back to an imagined life, or a romanticized version of Olden Times. It provides a slightly more realistic picture of the time of knights and serfs than that preferred by the types of little boys who play with castle-themed Lego sets, and who grow into still-little (but older) boys who play Dungeons and Dragons when their peers are making out somewhere, and who go to college and choose to take senior seminars on Geoffrey Chaucer.Levellers, a name which sounded familiar, like something I might have learned about in Western Humanities the year before. What really drew me were the paintings on the CD booklets. They depicted sheaves of wheat and cartoon demons replacing new buildings with old ones. The music was even better—acoustic guitars, a fiddle, and a punk-as-hell rhythm section all flailing away in support of a singer proclaiming, in a broad rural English accent, his belief that modern life was killing us.  The Celtic-inflected melodies and obscurity of the band appealed to me as well, and I took the CDs home for the weekend to tape them for in-car play. For the next couple of years, the tape I made of the two albums (one per side) traveled with me on family vacations and, when I was able to drive our ’85 Volvo, was always in or right near its finicky old tape deck.

I guess, then, that my current obsession with that Fairport Convention album isn’t as anomalous as I might have thought. It fits the pattern—an interest in the romantic parts of the medieval times, a couple of years of playing druid characters in D&D games in friends’ basements, the Levellers, Chaucer. At least part of the pattern. For while the songs refer to a time in which I’ve been interested since I’ve had interests of my own, the music itself connects me to something else.

When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks studying archaeology with other precocious teenagers at Dublin City University, in Ireland. That summer, I visited the major relics of Ireland’s past—from the prehistoric burial mound at Newgrange to the ringforts of Tara, and the ruined monastery at Clonmacnoise in the west and the really creepy crypts under Christ Church in downtown Dublin. The education I received was top-notch and fortified my growing interest in studying history. The professors treated us as though we were their college students, and we responded (from what I remember) by probing ever deeper in our efforts to solve some mysteries of the past.

But what was even more important about that summer was that it was the first time I was on my own and far away from home. I’d spent summers away before—assorted camps and academic programs kept me busy from middle school onward—but never in a foreign country. I remember wanting so badly to make the DCU campus and Dublin itself into places where I felt comfortable. I soaked up every conversation I had with my new Irish friends, trying to figure out if they were basically the same or different from my friends in Connecticut. I was fascinated by their accents, by the music they listened to (just like ours, but a year behind the times), by the corn that came on their pizza, and by what it would be like to grow up as a nerd in another country.

I wanted to be one of them. In three weeks, I started to identify with these kids from so far away, in whose country I was a guest. I realized that they weren’t so different from me, and that I was able to pronounce even their most difficult names after they spelled them out for me. I felt accepted and as assimilated as I could be in such a short time.

That summer was the one right before I discovered the Levellers.  Their music brought me right back to Ireland, but to a romanticized version thereof. I heard very few fiddles there, or even singers without American accents, but I knew enough about Celtic music to recognize that this band from rural England was trying to conjure up the ancient British Isles, and that I now was connected to that idea too. I romanticized Ireland because I had been blessed to have had a wonderful time there. The Levellers used music that I identified as Irish (not realizing that pre-industrial English music was so similar) to hearken back to a time when, they thought, life was simpler and more rewarding. The parallels were there, had I thought more about them.