I have been accused by several of my friends of being stuck in the past when it comes to my taste in music.

Well, yes and no. I would be the first to admit that I'm not keyed into the modern pop scene. I did buy a current CD last summer after hearing Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" again and again on the radio in Texas, and I bought the "Songs for Japan" collection for earthquake benefit on iTunes a few months ago. But no, I'm not really into the modern pop scene all that much.

That isn't to say I haven't been discovering a great deal of new music -- at least new to me -- lately. I have a ton of French music on my iPod, from troubadours Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour to rockers Johnny Hallyday and Eddy Mitchell. I've got Italian songbird Laura Pausini and German crooner Herbert Groenemeyer, and in the last week or so I have started loading up on Australian music.

I don't know exactly how that got going. I watched "Gallipoli" and I heard about Eric Bogle's song, "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," and I started looking for more music.

[caption id="attachment_1293" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Eric Bogle"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/eric7thumb.jpg"><img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-1293" title="eric7thumb" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/eric7thumb-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a>[/caption]

What I discovered is that Bogle, who will be 67 years old this fall, could easily be called the Australian Harry Chapin.

Many people won't remember Harry, who died in an automobile accident in 1981 at the age of 38, but he wrote dozens of beautiful story-songs and actually had one chart-topper in the mid '70s with "Cat's in the Cradle."

Bogle was born in Scotland and emigrated to Australia in his twenties. Many of his songs are ones I could easily picture Chapin singing