For Farley, 'Exodus' brings back memories of a childhood visit to the place where he was born

Whenever I think of Exodus, I think of my own Jamaican homecoming. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Bob Marley's classic album, Exodus. It's an album that has gotten global acclaim since its release in 1977. Several years ago it was named album of the century by Time magazine.

I was a music critic at Time magazine then, and I was the one who nominated the album for that recognition. Some other editors made light of my choice, and called Marley's reggae music a regional form, like polka. They thought the Beatles or Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley would be more deserving. To convince the other editors, critics and writers, I bought copies of Exodus and handed them out. Marley made his own argument - and he was convincing. The news that his album had been chosen as the album of the century made news around the world.

My interest in Exodus had begun almost three decades before. Marley famously recorded the album after leaving Jamaica in the wake of a failed assassination attempt against him. In 1977, I was 10 years old and I went to Jamaica for one of my first trips as a solo traveler.

I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and my grandparents lived in the countryside. I had gone back in the past, but I was usually accompanied by my parents. Now I was finally old enough to go back by myself. There's something liberating about traveling alone, especially to another country. I was actually only alone for a short time. I was seen off at the gate by my parents and met at the airport by my grandparents. But while I was in the air, leaving upstate New York, above the Caribbean Sea and circling the island of my birth, I felt positively weightless.

I was listening to a lot of great music around that period. Stevie Wonder had come out with Songs in the Key of Life. The Talking Heads and the Clash were making waves. But Marley's music spoke to me in a different way.

I can't quite remember if my mother brought home the album Exodus or if I bought a copy on my solo trip. But either way, the songs on the album are tangled up in the feelings I had when I returned to Jamaica. The island to me seemed to move at a different pace, and to a different beat, than where I lived in Upstate New York. Marley had identified that rhythm and put in on record.

The sounds of Exodus have also lasted in my memory.

Like most people, I no longer do a lot of the things I was doing when I was ten years old. I don't watch the same cartoons, or wear the same sky-blue leisure suit, or ride the same ten-speed bike. (Well, I still watch cartoons - but with my five year old son.) But I find myself returning repeatedly to Exodus. While most of the things we had as kids seem small to us now - the shoes, the bunk beds, and some of the music we once loved - Marley's album only seems to grow in stature. I listen to it and feel new emotions, or discover fresh nuances. It seems less like an inanimate object and more like a living thing.

I think one of the great joys of Exodus is this: its central theme is not about leaving, but about staying put. Bob Marley never left behind his core principles, his commitment to the downtrodden - and he never separated himself from Jamaica, even when the Atlantic Ocean lay between him and the place where he was born. The material on Exodus bears that out - drawing from Jamaican myth and culture, and making the life of the Third World something of interest the world over.

So instead of taking me away, Exodus takes me back. Whenever I hear the songs off of the album - "Natural Mystic," "Waiting in Vain," "Turn Your Lights Down Low," and all the other great tracks - I find that I am ten years old again, aloft, in a window seat, peering over a green island, waiting to land, but knowing, like Marley must have, that I never really left.

Christopher John Farley is the author of the novel Kingston by Starlight and the biography Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley, recently out in paperback.