This morning, my nephew (12 going on 9 going on 19) and I were treated to a short discourse on the music of the 1970s by my brother. It was 6:45 or so, and I’d dragged myself out of bed to see my nephew put the finishing touches on a school project he’d stayed up late working on last night. Convoluted and complex, it involved cardboard and spray paint and a chairlift made of wire and tiny pictures meticulously connected with clear packing tape. It was classic junior-high stuff, and it was fun to watch him work feverishly on it.

As it happens, it was a mountain. And since, as previously mentioned, my brother is wont to pepper every conversation with song lyrics, he began singing “he lived on the morning side of the mountain, and she lived on the twilight side of the hill.”

Neither nephew nor I knew the reference. Warbled by the Osmonds before it was warbled by my brother, the song was released in 1975, the year I was born. My brother proceeded to find a YouTube version of it, which he blared through the early-morning air, holding his laptop aloft and grinning alongside toothy Donny and Marie.

My nephew, torn between laughter and eye-rolling, summed up the situation: “There sure was a lot of bad music back then.”

My brother, agreeing, proceeded to look up Jimmy Osmond and play (and sing along with) a delightful ditty called “Little Arrows.”

I like to think I know a fair amount about the music of the 1970s, despite not having been around for half the decade. But this just reminded me that there is a trove of treasures with which I am unfamiliar. Just now, sitting in the kitchen with the radio streaming on my own laptop, I heard Bread’s “Everything I Own,” another unfamiliar tune, this one from 1972, the year my parents married.

My primary association with Bread is snarky references made to them by a writer, I think Dave Barry. I don’t believe I could name a single other song by them, although it’s possible that, like Dean Martin, they’ve been secretly providing the soundtrack to my life.

However, I just asked my brother if he could sing a Bread song, and after a suspicious “why” over his bifocals, he busted out with his best falsetto — “Baby I’m A-Want You,” “Everything I Own,” and “Diary,” in quick succession.

He provided a footnote only for “Everything I Own” (having no idea that I’m sitting here writing about it), saying it was a huge hit when he was in the fifth grade. Then explained to me that it is about the singer’s mother, not a love interest. Dropped in some factoids about Telly Savalas and Eddie Albert covering Bread songs, then circled back to the fact that “1974 to 1976 was just an abysmal time for music.”

It is useful, and highly entertaining, to have older siblings. Is all I’m saying.

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