Rediscovering Music

In my Cleveland excursion I got to go into the infamous tool shed into which I had stuffed all of my hopes and dreams (read: art supplies and CDs). While it was upsetting to have my beautiful charcoal set covered in mouse shit and to watch as huge centipedes (my kryptonite) crawled all over my stereo, it was also so much fun to revisit with my old things. For the first time in my life I was a little bit embarrassed about the sketchbooks and journals that I came across. All I could think was "there are people who knew me when I did this stuff and are still friends with me?"

Now that I have half of that stuff back in SF with me I'm able to start re-digesting my old tasty morsels of culture. Namely- my music! How sweet it is to have it again. As we speak I'm listing to Blazing Arrow for the first time in a year. It is such a good fucking album. I know that this is old news- but sometimes it's important to recognize the oldies. The songs fit so perfectly together and his lyrics are so damn good and the guest artists are exactly right for each song.

What's also funny is how I can track my musical taste by format. When I first started listening to music I bought a lot of CDs (I think Jagged Little Pill was my first purchase). Soon the Napster started getting big and I did a little bit of downloading but I don't think I ever really got comfortable with it. So I just turned a lot of CDs into MP3s and then burned a lot of CDs. So now more than half of my musical collection selection is composed of burned CDs. Now, however, I'm a big fan of buying music again.

Furthermore, I've noticed that while I love music that I genuinely like, the majority of the music I like I like for nostalgia. I feel like every time I listen to a new band it's been introduced to me by someone. Therefore when I listen to their music, I think about that person. So I might like really shit music but I associate it with people who I care about and so I will listen to it with pleasure Example

Back to work.