I’ve been revisiting a lot of music I lived decades ago, recently. This is less an existential, midlife crisis experience than it is a practical one; for the first time in years, I have access to a CD player, and that makes it somehow easier to pick and choose forgotten albums or mixes filled with songs I haven’t remembered than when everything was, theoretically, available at the push of a button.
Part of it is, I think, the odd nostalgia of sitting there physically surrounded by the opportunity; leafing through the various CDs and being consistently surprised by what’s there for the picking. I’m reminded of living in Scotland before I switched continents, with a room essentially full of CDs and CD cases — god, I loved them, the artwork, the whole thing; I’d buy CDs for their design alone sometime — and being almost paralyzed by the opportunity and potential of what to listen to next, but knowing that something would catch my eye, hold in my ear.
I’d go through periods of buying particular things, or particular types of music. I have a whole host of Blue Note compilations for two simple reasons: my local record store was selling them cheaply, and I was looking for one specific version of Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How.” (Oh, those pre-iTunes days when you had to search to find the right song!) So many of those albums didn’t have the song, but brought a whole host of new favorites instead; that kind of accidental discovery was a joy of the period.
When I moved to the US, I kept the CDs but got rid of the cases, packing them into those folders with all the sleeves. (Yes, it felt like a loss, but a necessary one; I couldn’t handle so much luggage.) With the anal attitude of the me I was then, I tried to pack them together by genre, or at least feel, putting albums and mixes together by mood. It’s a choice then that’s been paying off now, sitting on the floor beside the CD player decades later and saying, “Fuck, who remembers The Soft Bulletin?”