Less is More

My older brother pretty much raised me. One time he was going off to spend the summer with his father (my dad is his step-father). Needless to say, I was pretty torn up about the whole deal, being about 10 at the time.

Anywho, my brother loved Van Halen, totally thought he was David Lee Roth. I would always sit in the corner of his room and listen to all his vinyl with him.

So, when he was on his way out the door, he handed me a mixed tape he had made. Mostly Van Halen, with some solo David Lee Roth thrown in (Crazy from the Heat).

Nowadays, I'm above liking Van Halen. Too cool for school and all that. I'm only interested in songs about life and the meaning therein. Not songs about long-legged hotties and partying all night. Give me some substance. But I tell ya, every time itunes or the ipod ques up Roth's cover of "Coconut Grove", I just can't help being transported back to a time when a song didn't affect me because of it's intelligence. I am 10 again, and indeed, all the lowbrow qualities are lost on me. All that matters is I'm hanging out with my brother again in his basement bedroom.

Beautifully said, and I couldn't agree more.

Every trip I went on, every summer that I listened to a certain record, it all gets stored much more permanently than nowadays.

Too much music can be a bad thing.

My remembrances: Counting Crows (self-titled), Weezer (self-titled), R.E.M. Eponymous, Björk Debut, Nirvana Nevermind, and Pearl Jam Ten.

Some of it sucked, but it is in my memory for ever.

Good thoughts. I came to the same conclusion about two years ago now (25 now), and also when I recently moved about a month ago about how much music I have accumalated as well. I started to realize that now I'm more invested in artists that I think will still be around a few years from now rather than artists which I think have a brevity of life, or seem to be more of a fad of the music industry than anything else. I cleaned out my CD collection, donated, sold and threw out CD's, ripping only the few songs I would ever want to hear again. I used to listen to certain genres of music, then stopped and started changing my own tastes, and with that, stopped listening to a majority of the artists from that genre but held maybe one or two which I think have a longer "shelf-life" or as I mentioned "will be around" and in effect have more to offer down the road, musically and artisticallyand still enjoy the heck out of.

I'm 20, and probably of that "new" generation that's used to having 7,500 songs in my pocket. Regardless of that ability, I choose not to exercise it. My playlist consists of around 200 songs, and that's plenty. Stuff gets cut, stuff gets added, and some stuff ALWAYS stays. It's the way I am.

I love what you just said.

I never really understood why people need SO MUCH music. It blows my mind that anyone has 7500 songs that they want to load onto an iPod for listening. I am still young (a "kid") and during any given month, I probably only listen to about 20 new songs. When I purchase a CD, it's playing in my car for the next 2 or 3 weeks. When I download a couple new songs, I listen to them many times daily.

And, like you said, dozens of my feelings, emotions, and memories are attached to the music I've listened to. Certain songs remind me of junior-high/middle school; other songs remind me of certain summers; some songs even remind me of certain people.

With 7500 songs on an iPod, I doubt that many others acquire these same connections.

I couldn't agree more. Great post.

When Radiohead's Kid A came out, I remember telling my girlfriend "I'm going to buy this album and play it a lot so it always reminds me of this winter". She looked at me funny at the time, but you know, it worked. For both of us.

Good post.

Pearl Jam - Ten and Seal - Seal (1991 and 1994!) are the top hitters on my nostalgia chart.

I don't really have any particularly nostalgic connection to the music I've collected over the years. I don't have a 'soundtrack to my adolescence' or anything like that. But one thing is for sure: I can't bear to part with anything that I have, and I can't quench my thirst for new music. Sure, I have CDs that I rarely listen to, but the point of having a collection is for those days when you start humming a tune, say to yourself 'I wonder if I have that?', find the CD, then listen to the other songs, and so on. Tangents like that, they're like the threads that link moments together.

I grew up with music mostly being "what was on the radio". Knew titles, somewhat knew artists, had no real idea about albums as artistic wholes (albums where "greatest hits" collections.)

In late highschool and early college, that changed. But albums were still expensive, so they'd get played a lot. Over time, albums got tied to *relationships*, and after a breakup, the album would be unplayable at first, then become nostalgic.

Getting a job and an early Discman meant it was worth buying albums again, because I could play them on the road. (TMBG "Flood" == that all-nighter driving with friends to Richmond) But at around 100 albums, there stopped being any point in getting more.

Eventually, mp3 came along and changed all that - I could put everything on the computer, and play it from the laptop. Even better, I could "shuffle" across a hundred albums and still get stuff I knew I liked (since it was worth buying in the first place.) Ended up causing me to buy another 20 albums or so because I could pull out the 3 songs that meant anything.

Today, I have been able to dig deeper into my past with the iTunes store - "Ballroom Blitz" brings back grade school memories, so it's in the shuffle now (even though the album itself is decades out of print.) New music mostly comes into my life via the radio, and it's more story-telling pop than anything. The other source is songs friends play, or albums that are gifts. My collection is mostly "full" at this point - in my mid 30's.

(And no, I never saw any point to napster.)

There's one song that kills me every single time I hear it: "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" from Paul Simon's Graceland album.

It must have been more or less the time the album came out, because I was on a flight heading out of Sydney Australia, and it was on one of the in-flight audio channels as a featured CD. I was already a bit of a fan of that album, so I tuned in, stared out the window at the murky weather, and waited to get moving, disappointed there wouldn't be much of a view...

So, we take off, and climb gently through the grey, and "Diamonds..." starts. The grey lightens up a little, and just as we pop out of the cloud in to the brilliant sunlight, the intro of the song stops and the guitars come gently sliding in.

Every time I fly on a cloudy day, I am suprised that the sun does indeed exist above the cloud, but with the perfect synchronicity of the clouds/sun/music and everything else... Well. You couldn't have planned it better. It you saw it in a movie you'd cringe at the cheesiness factor of it all.

15 or so years on, and 13,000 miles away, and I am smack bang back there. And that's no bad thing.

You're getting older and suffering from a disease common to people of your age especially after aquiring real estate called nostalgia.
Just like boomers who inflicting us with there insipid 60’s classic rock when we were growing up you are become dull
There is only one cure
Throw out every thing! albums cd’s dumb all your mp3’s
Get a subscription to CMJ and don’t listen anything over 2 years old
And maybe, just maybe you can prevent your self from become an intolerable bore

As a kid growing up I spent countless hours at the community pool. One song stands out from summers spent there, "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" by CSN&Y. Everytime I here it I can feel the hot summer sun, and smell the chlorine and sun tan oil.

I, too, have a beat up case of old cassettes, about 30 or so, that contained my best music for years. Now I have almost 10 GB of MP3 tracks at my disposal. I find that only a couple hundred make it to my daily play list consistently.

Your posting brought back memories for me... and I will be playing some of those old tapes once again.

Thank you.

I am only 16 but as I spent somet ime last ngiht rumaging through our loft I found my mum's old tape collection, there has ot be at least 100 or more tapes in loads of show boxes. So as I hunted through them seeing what she used to listen to I came across loads of Pink Floyd stuff (some original tapes some copies) and I put a few on and I could really see why she listend to them... they were amazing.

I dont have an MP3 player and on the rare occassion I buy a CD (i have little money as I'm too lazy to work) I play them contsantly for about a month then get a new CD or two. How someone can lug around and listen to 7,500 songs I don't know and to be honest I couldnt pick out more than 3 CDs worth of music I would want to listen to alot. I have a Mini Disc player and the same disc is in it all the time and it never gets changed despite me having 10 other discs that while they have really good music on I jsut never want to listen to.

Excellent post :)

I posted my reply to this topic on my site: stereoboy.org.

I have a 10GB iPod and was debating whether to upgrade to the 7500 song one. but then I asked myself, do I need that many songs? 2k songs are more than enough for me. who needs that many, besides the joneses?
*new thought*
I love putting songs on repeat and listening to them over and over. that's how you know how good a song is, if you can listen to it back to back to back to back. test some songs in your collection.
enjoy the songs you have, nice thought Todd.

I listened to Semi-sonics "closing time" for 6 whole months straight before i moved to atlanta for college. It said exaclty what I was feeling.

I also listened to the Sarah M (mirror ball) album for a good long time. I have a habit of listening to the song over and over and over again, so many albums have memories for me.

I probably have around 7 gig of mp3s sitting around on my hard disk. Virtually all of them are parts of full albums. I seem to split between listening to albums and big huge shuffle playlists. New albums get played all the time for a while, then fall into two piles: the ones I still play all the time and get stuck into the big long shuffle lists and the one-shot wonders that don't see much light again. Being 19 I guess I'm part of the 7,500 song lark, but I'd be just as content with a tiny player that just took 30 I think. My music depends greatly on what I feel like at the time (same as most people I guess) which doesn't change so much during a single day (bar dramatics) so I don't see the point of 7,500 odd tracks... Great albums include a range of feelings anyway, so two or three can cover most bases.
On the nostalgia thing, I made a mix tape of a couple of albums that I always listened too in the car and hearing those albums, especially when driving just brings back some good memories! Most of my music brings back feelings rather than specific memories for me, though.

I'm in agreement about not being able to listen to nearly as many songs as my iPod can hold, but I've found another way to fill up it's space: audiobooks.

Once I've filled it up with unabridged versions of books on CD it becomes my best friend on long drives. Besides, I have a problem falling asleep while listening to music on long drives, I need an engaging story. That's why I'm thankful for all that space.

PS: the biography of Theodore Roosevelt, available as an unabriged CD audiobook, is fascinating. If we (collectively, Americans) were to have the balls to elect a jackass like that again our country would be a more interesting and functional place.

Great post, Todd...you always say exactly what I'm thinking.

The other thing that bothers me about the way people acquire music today is that they are really shortchanging the artist by just buying single tunes. Now, I don't mean shortchanging them monetarily. I mean their artistic vision.

When I grew up, a new album was a reason to celebrate. Every song on that album, the sequencing of the tracks, the cover art (a huge 12" x 12"), the printed lyrics...all were a clue to what the band or artist was about. The "whole" package was what defined an artist. Of course, they sold 45rpm singles, but the album is what mattered to true music fans. I'm afraid that this nexgen group is going to miss all that and it's importance, if all they buy are singles.

One of my favorite and most touching movie scenes is from "Almost Famous", where the main character finds his sister's record collection under the bed. It's a quiet and reflective scene as he slowly thumbs through them...there's Hendrix "Axis Bold as Love" and every important musician of that era...almost a mirror of my collection in the late 60s-early 70s. Wow, I damn near broke down seeing that...so much came flooding back.

You're right, sometimes I have so much stuff to listen that I dont focus enought on what could be the album of my life.
That didnt happen when the old tapes were around.

I'm always shocked by how thin and flat the music of my pubescent heyday sounds nowadays, but as soon as the first notes of Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell plunk by I can always vividly smell Dippity-Do and clove cigarettes, taste my first kiss, and hear my mother calling me to take out the trash.

I wonder what today's crap music will do to tomorrow's 30-somethings. How often will Eminem, N'sync or, at very least, Avril Lavigne fill a freshly acquired crow's foot with an errant tear?

I agree with your concept of bookmarking your life with music but I think that its the acquiring of music that enables this bookmarking. I personally have a vast music collection and every few months, my iPod will play a song that I forgot I had. Suddenly all of the memories of the time when I acquired it come flooding back. Using the same songs over and over, season after season cheapens the memories associated with that music. Constantly getting new stuff creates a catalog of memories. At least thats what I think.

Oh my god...the memories attached to music in my life are many and vivid. I remember in almost perfect detail being 10 years old (almost 16 years ago...wow...), having just moved to Cape Cod and hanging out in the basement of some neighborhood kids. One of them put on Appetite for Destruction by Guns N Roses, and it was a life-defining moment. I had never heard anything like that in my life, and I can clearly recall one of my newly found freinds singing along to Sweet Child O' Mine. To this day that album sounds as fresh and new as the first time I heard it.

Hearing Jane's Addiction for the first time in 7th grade was another one. Seeing the controversy on MTV over Perry Farrell's Ritual De Lo Habitual album cover and knowing that I had to buy that album, with the uncensored art as soon as possible. And then the music opening my eyes to something outside of the world of Metal. That album was my Jr. High soundtrack.

I could go on and on. Every defining moment of my life has music to go with it, good and bad. It really doesn't matter how cool or underground the song is, if its playing then it will be burned into that memory. Some of those songs I don't even know the names of. If they come on the radio then it all hits me all over again, like a drive by nostalgia. Even today, with my 30gigs of music that I barely listen to. Some of those songs are just sitting there waiting to be the one playing when the next major thing in my life happens.

Every time I hear a Bread song I remember playing the greatest hits album over and over, crying from my crush on my junior high biology teacher. Eye of the Tiger and Rosanna remind me of a car trip I took with my best friend to celebrate graduating from high school. Red Red Wine, Piano in the Dark and Don't Worry, Be Happy remind me of my three years living in Louisiana. Don't know what's changed but I can't think of any recent songs that tie to important memories... is it the music or do I need to create some more memorable times?

I have to agree with some of the others. Pearl Jam "Ten" received a lot of play during the summer of my senior year in highschool.

After that the last album that really defined a period of my wife is Radiohead - OK Computer. That CD had a permanent spot in my old 5 disc changer. "Karma Police" is (and most likely will always be) one my favorite songs. I remember hearing them play that on Letterman; it gave me the chills.

I'm with you on the nostalgia thing, as I have vivid memories of listening to the Fat Boys and the Beach Boys in the back of a mini-van driving across the country, but I still value my large collection of music.

I love getting a new record and sitting down and listening to it straight through. I love the rush of finding a new band I know I'm going to fall in love with. I love sitting down with my collection and listening to albums that have escaped me for years. I love that when I have a group of friends over I always have music that will please nearly everybody. There is something amazing about having a wonderfully vast library of music that cannot be reproduced by listening to just a couple albums.

I just don't see why there isn't room for nostalgia and a large record collection.

There are lots of things that I cannot seem to throw away. Music is definitely one of them. The interesting thing here is that there are lots of cd?s that I have that serve as bookmarks in my life, and then there are just songs or artists that bring back memories...

My first ?serious? girlfriend loved the NIN Pretty Hate Machine disc, there were many hours making out to that...really odd now that I think about it. Then there was the girl who loved anything punk, and the night we went to see Bad Religion in Jacksonville was put on to their live cd. I cannot listen to it without thinking about us being ?broken up? and still managing to make out on the way to the show...The next girl hated Social Distortion, and loved the Gypsy Kings. Needless to say I own the entire Social D catalog, and cringe anytime I hear the Gypsy Kings. The Air ?Moon Safari? disc has been played so many times in the last 5 years that it has spanned too many memories and moments for them to even be recalled...

And finally there is my wife, and her love for jazz, and the Stan Getz and Mel Tormé that we played at our wedding, and out on our honeymoon. Music is something that just works wonders to capture moments and elements in your life. It doesn?t matter if you have 30 songs or 30,000.

Oh yeah, we used the ipod as the DJ for our wedding, and to store directions to places for the honeymoon. That was awesome.

I couldn't agree more with this article. Now that I have my own income and can spend it the way I want to (not to mention Kazaa), I have access to more music than I can ever process. I love my ipod, but in a way it IS overkill. I'm always hearing about new bands that I should be checking out from websites, (New Pornographers anyone?) and I definitely try to keep up with it. But listening and experiencing music these days is different than it was when I was younger.

Going through the same thing. My folks dumped a box of my old tapes at my house the other day; one box full of home-made compilations dubbed 3rd hand from friends (Bauhaus...the Cure...boy we were gloomy in 1986!), illegal Indonesian market bootlegs (Split Enz!) and indeed a pile of Sire and Mute artists....

When I was dating someone that lived 500 miles away, I remember always bringing Remain In Light by Talking Heads for the journey, and listening to weird late-70s RISD-damaged artfunk as I watched the sun going down out the train window....

I do despair that we, the 80s generation as a whole, will become boring in our endless fascination for John Hughes film soundtrack bands...but those of us who have posted here have demonstrated that new music does sell to people over 18!

Here in Montreal, where radio is truly dire, new music is propagated by music video (MusiquePlus plays a hefty share of new artists) but mostly by clubs, music reviewers and band 'scenes'. You'll never hear Interpol on Montreal radio, but you'll hear them at any number of alternative-music clubs.

While there will always be ska bands (The Planet Smashers!) the action is with the electro/techno/DJ scene in this town...Tiga, Misstress Barbara, Amon Tobin (who recently moved to town) etc.

If you like the Smiths, Todd, you'll love The Dears. Their new disc, No Cities Left, is probably the best record I've heard all year! (www.thedears.org)

I have a lot of about 100 tapes that I collected since age 12... very old radio recordings, things like that (I'm also an avid vinyl collector, which probably reinforces my dinosaur status in this digital age). However, I can't get rid of them - what's the use? These tapes defined me musically throughout all my formative years and bring me my great share of pleasant memories when life was simpler. Actually, my perception of all this frenzy of MP3 stores, Kazaa and the like is that all of it is slowly but surely transforming music as more of a disposable product and less as something we can cling our memories to. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I feel sometimes when I see how easy and quick is to grab -in numbers- as much music as what it took years to get in the past.

I think it's the time of life, not the amount of music, that sets those memories so firmly in place. Mid-teens to early twenties are when most of our hugely emotional life experiences happen, and it's also when we're at our most social. I think that's how the songs of that era, however we heard them (by tape, vinyl, CD , radio, TV) become so ingrained in our memories and important to us. I seriously doubt that a teen carrying 7,500 tunes is missing out on anything: they would still be making connections with certain songs, bands or albums that will be with them for the rest of their life, just because of what they are doing while listening to it.

But as we get older and our lives become more monotonous (same job, same friends, same lover, same house, same city) there's something to be said for forcing a musical trigger if that's what you want to do. If you want to remember the years spent at the computer in X-company, repeated play of a small selection of music will help.

Reading your post and these comments I realized I tend to do that anyway: become obsessive about a genre or artist so that time does get defined partly by what I was listening to.

The interesting thing is how GOOD it feels to remember this way.

Ok, so you might be right about this music thing, but just to clarify: Less is less. More is more.

To second one of the posters above. I do have the ability to listen to thousands of songs and carry them with me everywhere I go. I could go from every cd ever made by Guns N Roses to the Wu tang clan by literally pushing a button. I rarely do that though, as I tend to get hooked on certain performers and records in periods... During which I rarely listen to more than 10 cds maximum.

And now for those classic records that I once had on copied tapes that helped shape me into the fine young man I am today: Faith No More - Angeldust, House Of Pain - House Of Pain, EPMD - Strictly Business, Beastie Boys - Pauls Boutique, Paul Simon - Live In Central Park. Neil Young - Harvest.

When I was in high school (graduated '89) it was all about the mixed tape. My friends and I were all DJs, and we avid collectors of 12"s, which for obvious reasons couldn't be played in the car, etc. So as you can imagine I have many of those tapes lying around to this day, and just like you talk about they have an identity of their own.

The "flow" was very important, I'll never forget I have a tape "Elan" where Nitzer Ebb's "Join In The Chant" was mixed into Human League's dub mix of "Don't You Want Me" -- it was like heaven at the time, the perfect mix. There were many others on that tape and they gave the tape a life of it's own.

It was copied and passed around and years later I can still talk to people at my high school who remember that tape. It's like a little time capsule floating around, containing shared memories of what it was like durning that time.

The tape is still around, but in bad shape. Good thing I have all the records and my decks, while dusty, still work -- maybe I'll recreate it, rip it and put it in the iPod. ;)

My favorite band of all time is Erasure, but I was only introduced to them in university (people in my hometown just didn't listen to groups like Erasure). When I entered school they had already released five new albums (in the span of five years), and I somehow managed to stumble on them in order...

Wonderland - the first Erasure album, and my introduction to university. I felt like a small fish in a big pond, and this album always brings me back to that initial stage of wonder at a brand new world.

The Circus - deeper than Wonderland, and darker in spots, this album reflects the melancholy feelings I got sometimes when I was still trying to figure out who I was.

The Innocents - possibly my favorite album, not so much for the music, but because I was listening to this album when I met and fell in love with J...

Wild! - I used to take phrases from songs on this album and write them on people's message boards, accompanied by appropriate stick figures. To this day I still do not know why.

Chorus - this album was released the year I discovered Erasure, and thus will always represent "new Erasure" for me, no matter how many albums they may release.

I Say I Say I Say - 1994, and life is changing. I spend a semester in London, J breaks up with me, and somehow I've got to figure out what to do with my life after graduation. I don't listen to this album too much anymore--it's just too hard to listen to.

Erasure - the first album I bought in Korea. Strange as it may sound, it was a rock to hold on to in the midst of the storm that was my life at the time.

Cowboy - I'm married now, life is setting down, and I think I actually may be maturing. I was delighted to find Erasure maturing along with me.

Loveboat - I bought this one in the basement of the Trump Tower in New York. I had just spent the morning waiting in line in Central Park for tickets to "The Seagull" with my brother and my wife. It was raining outside when I bought the album. This album makes me think of New York and my brother, two things I miss sorely.

Other People's Songs - Released this year, it will no doubt become a bookmark for this time in my life, yet another threshold as I embark on a career in academia.

Sorry for the length, but the post just spoke to me, and I wanted to share.

Having grown up in a rural town of about 2000 people in west Alabama, my first trip to California at age 9 was an eye-opener. It was also the greatest time of my entire life. This was in 1983, and Madonna's Borderline played from the "high tech" cascette stereo of my sister's boyfriend's Datsun (all my MOm had in her car at that time was a AM/FM radio. Everytime I hear Borderline, I feel 9 again, experiencing life in a wholly different way, like I was on drugs or something, riding up the mountain to the Redwood Forest.

like you
MUSIC used to be my entire world
now merely one of my pastimes
they used to be written & played by musicians
now it's all about dj-ing & sampling
but no
nostalgic is not a bore
so much as it's fun to watch an audio pro cutting & mixing bits & pieces
& i love to have a 30GB-player too
where i can play my REM & the smiths
alongside with david holmes & morcheeba
i'm sure that would be great

Personally I really don?t think that the amount of available music matters. Compared to what our parents, or even worse: our grandparents, had, our exposure to music was significantly more.
Anyway. I doubt that the medium matters. All my friends collected music and the only thing that mattered was if it struck a cord. If it spoke to our adolescent frame of mind. To our souls, if you will. And considering how many songs I discarded as not worthwhile while focusing on a few that made me all fuzzy inside with joy, I think that the most played songs on an iPod will be as many as on your tape deck.
But, I have to admit, that young girls today miss out on something: having to fumble with vinyl records, checking which song might fit the mood, prelistening, creating lists and then carefully recording a tape for your girlfriend just has to mean more than »rip mix burn« on your computer...
A tape was something that somebody (or oneself) created specifically and not something generic like a CD.
But then again, sending an iTunes playlist to the love of your life might be as romantic...

Or maybe not.

I'm not sure if it's really the abundance of music available that makes it feel a little less special, but more of the act of acquiring it. The act of going to a music store and waiting for the release date used to be a REAL THRILL for myself. Nowadays, every album is available to download in advance on P2P. I'm able to check out way more material than I used to be and I think that's a good thing. I probably have enough music on hand to listen non-stop for 6 months. What to do? Somehow visions of that Twilight Zone episode with the man who loves to read and then the bomb goes of. He finds he is the only man alive and discovers a library. All the books he could ever want and all the time in the world. Then his glasses break.

I listen to new music about as quickly as I can acquire it. It never seems to be fast enough. But even so, there are albums or songs that have become a soundtrack to my life.

When I was young (3 - 6 years old) I constantly listened to my older brothers' & sisters' vinyl. My favorite by far was Kiss. They had all the original albums through the late 70's. Just listening to Kiss was good enough for me at the time.

I also remember a tape of Pink Floyd's The Wall that my sister made from her record. But it skipped on a single note after like the third song through the rest of the tape. I listened to those opening songs with only the rest of the album playing in my imagination. I couldn't touch her copy of the album, because I would have gotten my ass kicked. When I finally got the CD in my twenties, it just didn't hold up to the expectation.

I don't think I'm alone in the fact that I wore out Thriller until you couldn't read the songs on the tape.

By 5th grade I got a CD player & could buy my own music. This period was the Beastie Boys' License To Ill and Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell. Also playing, was Paul Simon's Graceland.

In 7th grade, Guns 'n' Roses Appetite For Destruction dominated my CD player.

By 10th Grade, I'd discovered U2 and Achtung Baby changed my life. I will always remember the night I brought it home and Zoo Station came at me like a train through my headphones.

In my first year in college, R.E.M.'s Monster was the album most likely on my stereo. I also incessantly played a bootleg of a small Boulder band called Chris & Maggie (to the continued horror of my roommate).

The month my dad was dying, the Counting Crows song A Long December was all over the radio. I will always associate that song with this time in my life. U2's Pop came out at around the same time, and Wake Up Dead Man has somewhat the same feeling.

Since I've started my working life, the years have started to blend together somewhat, but personal landmark albums I've discovered have included Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, Kid A, and American Anthology of Folk Music.

I've found that if I take a shotgun approach to finding music, some albums will just naturally dominate my playlists. Others will fade away.

I've had my 20gig (windows) iPod for about 7 months now and with all my mp3's is now almost 13gigs full. But this post got me thinking and has made me realize that, when I get a new album I immediatly encode it and upload it onto my iPod. Then the only time I hear a song from my new album is when it pops up on random. I would say 95% of the music listened to on my iPod is when my entire library is on random. I love the suprise of what comes next and what I might hear that I have not heard in a while, or would have never played on my own. But the downside to all this is that I lose the connection with my new music and the environment that it's relating to in my life.... Something I may have to pay more attention to , because that is what is so great about music.

Isn't it all about our insatiable appetite for more? For something new? For more of the same?

It's not about the experience of the music itself. If we want a tune to make us feel happy, or sad, or mad, then there's already a tune that we probably own that will help us feel like that.

In the modern digital age, we have learnt to crave more than just incessant newness - now we crave multiple streams of incessant newness at the one time eg. music videos (music plus visuals). How many of us surf the 'net whilst listening to music, whilst probably watching the tv in our peripheral vision at the same time?

This is very true - I have found that I listen to one cd of burned music for months before burning a new one and changing it. You don't really feel the music until you know very well sometimes.

I remember watching a depeche mode video where Dave gahan was walking somewhere in the Alps handling a deckchair and singing "words like violence, break the silence" . I realised how great it was to be singing such a thing. I was a teenager, almost 16 years old didn't know much of english. All i remember is how good it felt to listen to something somehow comfortable and also puzzling later on came Spirit of Eden from Talk-Talk but it is another story....

in 8th grade, my older sister picked me up after i had finished a date with a girlfriend of 6 months. i was crying silently. we had broken up.

the parking lot in front of the movie theatre was dark, and she hadnt noticed my tears then. but when she did, she played through her shot speakers siamese dream, the 1993 release by the smashing pumpkins. and it fit.

siamese dream is now an album for remembering and for heartbreak and for still getting over it. and it still fits.

I remember a similar experience with cassette tapes. I still have two shopping bags full of of tapes, many of them warped from the heat in my glove compartment, many with the only copies of some truly great songs and compilations I may ever own. It might be worth investing in transfering what's salvagable to digits, but I'll probably never get around to it. In any case, I've also been raising the same questions as I fill up my iPod, and I've come to believe that the iPod is a new medium. It takes from broadcast media as well as more "tangible" media, primarily tapes and CD's, which are simply much, much smaller storage devices. It replaces neither, but offers a new kind of experience with music. It's useful to compare, but I wouldn't stifle the spread of the new devices because they lack some kind of authenticity that is gleaned from more analog/less portable media in retrospect. This is all stuff I'm pondering, slowly but steadily, on Other Media (linked from my name, apparently :)).

that WAS an amazing post, and just reading everyone else's comments made me feel sad, and almost feel a community with other 30-something strangers.

I'm not even sure I'll ever need to listen to those mixed tapes from ex-friends anymore, as I've listened to them so much (from the pre-CD world) that I still know all the words from every Smiths or Depeche or Cure song ever made, but I keep them because just seeing the old and/or former friend's handwriting DOES take me back to dark and interesting places...

Not quite a 30-something but still old enough to remember learning how to type on an old typewriter. The strange thing is that Purple Rain always brings me back to my model trains. Tom Waits though is more like a 'student' kind of thing, with a cigar and whiskey. Pastorius is more of a moody kind. Like now, without work and a lot of things on my head I tend to forget there's music to take me on a journey. 'Enjoy what you have now.....Repeat until they become a bookmark of now ..........a cache of vivid memories wrapped around every note, lyric, and album cover..... ' Nice to know other people exp. the same thing. Just recently 'found' your site by mistake. It's nice. It's got that 'typewriter' feel. Not dull though. More something of enjoying the good stuff. Thanx, Btw, if not everything is 'proper' English I'm sorry but this is the best I can do.
Michael, Netherlands

I got to thinking about this, and I've introduced a feature to my Web site that I call Song Of The Week - hit my site (http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/) to check it out - anyway, in doing this I'm kinda making a virtual mixed tape on my site that I find myself listening to at work, etc.

It's still rather small as it's been only four weeks, but hey once I'm 10-15 weeks in it'll make for a nice mix that pretty much anyone can stop by and check out...

Oh, man - you had a Celica...

the more you move house the more crap you throw away. I used to collect videos, toys and music now i collect nothing as the boxes of crap controlled me. "Can't move there where will i put my toy collection"

I moved 3 times in 12 mths (yay for renting) and each time the bar for what was crap and what to keep got higher. I now don't have much stuff and i love it.

You said it. I am 17 and my formative years of musical taste where when I had a cheap Walkman and with nothing more than Led Zeppelin IV and Hootie and the Blowfish's Cracked Rear View in the backseat of my parents station wagon going cross-country.

Now I have thousands of just-as-good or better songs (no one beats IV though) and it's a lot less meaningful to me. I have tried to configure iTunes to give a nice, narrow field of music, but I keep flipping around and there is no continuity and it all does become meaningless to me, the great songs of Dylan, Lennon, Waters, and Spears reduced to a heap of maliable crap.

I'll take your advice, just several songs or an album at a time--which I have done before and liked--but it is so hard, with so much right there. But you're right.

Thanks putting in words what I really haven't.

Exactly. So true. All my Depeche Mode and Cure is on cassette, which prevents the young whippersnapper in the office from borrowing them to create mp3s. "Sorry, dude... back then all we had was cassettes and we LIKED it!"

My favorite cassettes are:
1. old answering machine cassettes circa early 80's.
2. My best friend and I in high school singing the theme song to "Endless Love", totally serious about it.

Ouch. That confession hurt.

I've often thought this very same thing. I've tried to replace most of my old, well-worn tapes with CDs but I just haven't gotten to all the tapes that I wasn't crazy about, but some party of me really wants to hear again.

Dang. I need to go hunt down that "Heart" self-titled album now.

Most of the nostalgia of the music age came from the mid 1970s and early 1980s. I remember creating mixed tapes from the radio and the movie, "Weird Science". The music that I really enjoy these days are the ones that my parents used to play in their car. Hits from the 1940s, '50s, 70s, and 80s.

However, I believe it was not the music that defined who I am, but the experiences that I felt around me. That was the influence.

In the present, I only keep the songs that I really enjoy. The other, "popular" songs go in the garbage. I try to keep clutter to a minimum and focus on only keeping songs that mean something to me.