I think about this all the time. Music used to BE my life. I was going to be a rock star and write books on the side. My friends and I moved to Seattle to do just that, were there during the big Seattle Thing in the 90s but only ever lived on the fringes. I STILL play music in a rock band and I love it, but when it comes to listening to music, I just don't do it. I miss stores with rows and rows of records and CDs. I love to see records making a comeback, but they largely a boutique item it seems for folks with more disposable income than me and are out of my budget.
Music for me, at least the buying and taste-making, is a role like a very familiar place that I used to spend a ton of time in with the love of my life but she left me, and now the memories are so thick—people no longer in my life, friends who were huge part of my musical life who have died, etc.—that I just can't go there very often. When I do, it's mostly wistful.
Lyle Lovett! While completely immersed in that Janes Addiction, Tool, RHCP, Faith No More scene (I know, seriously channeling my inner dude-bro with a tribal tattoo) still loved Lyle and his weird musical wordplay and slightly skewed worldview. I wish music meant as much as it used to, they say that your tastes tend to solidify (or stagnate) at around 30. I'd push it out a few years but I'm at the age where I do less exploring of new stuff I might like and more exploiting the music I know I still love.
I kept all my high school/college CDs—I just couldn't bear to part with them, even as iPods and then streaming came onto the scene—and a couple of years ago "upgraded" my ride to a 2007 Subaru with a CD player (the previous one only had a tape deck). It's been so much fun to sift through my collection and grab a few discs at random so I can rediscover them while I drive. So much music that I loved 20 years ago but had forgotten about ... and I can still remember all the words to sing along! I'm glad I didn't give in to the occasional impulse to ditch the discs.
Being that I was unable to afford CDs myself, I used to LIVE for those long trips for basketball or church where I could borrow CDs and burrow into the corner with my shitty player. You had different sources for different types of music. Katie had a cool older brother who was into the scene, so I'd borrow The Get-Up Kids from her. Chris had pop sensibilities, maybe I'd see if any other songs on that Semisonic album were any good. Phil loved Pearl Jam, let's see what their deal is. It was a completely unique sense of community, and I loved it.
I feel this so much. And I still have my Case Logic suitcase filled with my cassette collection from the early-mid 90's. It takes up space that I don't have, but I simply can't part with it. My best friends and I almost solely communicated via mix tapes when we all left for college. That is a lost art form I truly miss.
The 2-disc Essential Simon and Garfunkel was the first CD I ever bought when I was 10. I listened to it often enough that I could sing back most of it from memory. Then didn’t listen it thoroughout the Deleted Years but somehow moved it from CD to Google Music (now going away). Stumbled upon it again in 2016 and was shocked at how all of it came flooding back immediately.
My mom used to have a 2-disc Simon and Garfunkel collection on (not sure if it's the same one) whenever she wanted to seriously clean house. I'd be out playing, hear the music through the open window, and sneak in to catch her singing along.
Something I started doing a few years ago is making a playlist of all the songs I'm deeply into in a given year. So there's a 32 playlist and a 31 playlist, etc. (though several playlists got lost in the iTunes to Spotify shuffle and computer death). It's neat way to record these things and have a record you can come back to.
I loved this take - and made me remember the New Radicals album that enabled me to deal with so much change and trauma in 1999-2001, when coming of age for me from middle school into high school hit critical mass, right before the world changed in so many ways.
I had the physical CD - I remember finding it in the summer of 2001 in the "bargain" section at a Hastings Book & Music store in my tiny town in Nebraska (this was a few years past their peak radio hit "You've Get What Your Give") and rediscovered the joy it brought me then, and then again.
I'm not sure what made it happen, but Spotify shuffled a song from that album onto a playlist in the fall of 2016, right before the election. That CD was long gone, but the memory not so. I was hopeful, and was transported immediately to that hopeful time of change in my life 15 years prior. I left that album on repeat all through the rest of the year when the news just got worse and worse ...
Music is so powerful, you're all right. It's the only thing that really let's me cry ... and I'm completely OK with that being my taste.
I grew up in an extremely musical family. My parents met in a traveling opera company. My dad taught college music theory and directed choirs. It’s an old quote about Duke Ellington that his instrument was the orchestra. Dad’s was concert choirs. Mom worked outside of music, but she sang in dad’s choirs.
Growing up, I didn’t know there was music outside of musicals or symphony until I was like 11 or 12. I discovered the radio first, spent a few months with the pop greats, and then I befriended some nerds at a local CD warehouse and fell all the way into punk. I loved all of it. I love all of it still. I know my tastes are heavily shaped by my parents. I think the reason I’m kind of repelled by musicals as an adult is because I’m resentful? Parents who like to be on a stage also like to sing musicals directly into your face, and, to an adolescent’s horror, to the cool friends I wanted to be cool with. And then they want to make you sit still and watch them for every three hour preformance twice a week for eternity. To give them a break, as young musicians, they really couldn’t afford childcare. Fine.
My sister adores musicals, opera, symphony, dance. It worked with her. But my brother and I wholesale rejected it all.
I want to keep the rest brief. This essay has so much to it. I had to quit so much stuff to become pregnant. I didn’t miss alcohol. I liked eating healthy. I didn’t notice I’d stopped listening to music. A big part of it was the 2016 election. I started consuming news at a level I never had before. That was part of it. But a part of it, too, was being enthralled by the whole new world of parenting where I had to be very quiet for so much of the time.
I always had very loud jobs with a lot of music and people. Music at work and at home just fell away for 4 years when I became a stay at home mom. And now it’s back like it never left. At least, at home. Which I’ve barely left for six months. I had to change, or quit so many thing consciously that this one enormous part of my identity slipped away without notice.
It came back. My kids are 3 and 5 and in preschool 5 days a week, and I’ve had time like I’ve never had time before. Because of covid, and the horrors and misery of the news, I’ve been listening to music obsessively. I want to pour my soul out in this comments section about how much music has been integral to this moment. I feel like you hit on so many huge things at once, the way you always do. Thanks for writing it!
Haley Nahman wrote about how she thought her passive, algorithm-fueled consumption of media might have been contributing to her burnout (although she didn't call it burnout at that point). She used her and her boyfriend's different music-listening habits as an example. It made me start listening (really listening) to albums again!
I’ve been thinking about my loss of a music library lately. A couple of years ago my old laptop didn’t have anymore space so I was forced to move my iTunes library to an external hard drive and just use google play music. But I wasn’t able to collect my whole library there so now I feel lost- I know I have favorite albums but I usually can’t recall them when I want to listen to something. And there are too many choices on google so I end up just listening to the same 10 or so albums over and over.
When I recently moved into a new house I found my first iPod, which still worked. I charged it and have occasionally been listening to it because it has all my music and playlists from college and slightly after (2004-2008). It’s inconvenient but special.
Related- did you ever encounter mytunes in college? Somehow the college server would allow all the students to share music through iTunes for a brief period of time before I think they found out it was less than legal?
However, my regular rotation of music is expanding because my almost 2 year old has discovered the record player and is OBSESSED with the process- looking at the cover art, pulling the record out, helping to set it on the turntable and listening. Now I’m watching him already choose his favorite songs from our collection of favorite albums.
French immersion camp lady music! I have to know, are you a fellow Concordia Lac du Bois alum? One of the happiest times in my life was when I became the counselor singing the campers to sleep (in my case, “Downpour” by Brandi Carlile).
Reading this was so comforting. Remembering ripping songs from the radio, and Case Logic and the tape deck adapter. My car's tape deck was wonky so you had to put the tape in *just* right to get it to catch. Also, everyone should know that the #ThrowbackThursday playlist on Spotify today is a best of 2007 mix and I'm listening to it after reading this this morning. It's poppy and wonderful--these are the songs I listened to my senior year of college.
As for my actual taste-making. I had much older (Gen-X) siblings. My sisters would crank Aretha Franklin and we'd dance while we baked, then all the angsty 90s rock was in rotation too. Johnny Cash and other folk too. There was also a lot of Boomer-parent music. Including Lyle Lovett!! But, a lot of Paul Simon, Elvis (my dad was a very big pre-Vegas Elvis fan). Lots of Blues, and a lot of Classical music. I remember the way the corner with the stereo and all my Dad's CDs smelled and looked (sort of orderly, but really a mess, much like his office. My Dad was more formative than my mom, which is interesting because now she loves *my* (mostly indie/folk/mom pop) music because it's "calmer" than my Dad's taste.
I also remember the shame of not having any of my own music, and not really having any "cool" music one summer when my cousins were visiting and digging through the CD collection. I didn't personally *own* any music until Mariah Carey Music Box (1993, I was 9).
I feel like with current music-listening tech it is both too hard and too easy to get to music. I can listen to SOMETHING really easily, but its hard to proactively choose a collection that's my personal taste and not an algorithm or just the same one album over and over.
I recently started reading more fiction and that helped address my burnout for the same reason you're talking about here. A way to regain myself and something I used to really love but got squeezed out by hustling.
Too hard and too easy! YES. I hadn't figured out what the issue was, but that describes my feeling as well. Everything is so fleeting--oh, I like this song generated from an algorithm and I think I'll look up the band. But then, then baby needs dinner and the 3 year old is screaming for Frozen. I rely almost exclusively on a few reliable artist-focused Spotify playlists, which feels like good middle ground but I also feel like it's not intentional and I'm missing something.
The "deleted years" is interesting to me... I was in high school in the mid 00s and I can remember pretty well what music I was listening to each year bc I made highly curated mix CDs (complete with themes and titles like "Wanderlust" and "Heat Waves" lol) which then transformed into highly curated iPod playlists. In collage, I could live in certain albums and playlists for months, consumed while walking across campus. I still have my iPod from 2010-ish and I can revisit those playlists. It's such a gift from my past self.
This story is so VERY familiar. Same era, different artists, same obsession.
For me, the "lost years" are directly traceable to shifting away from physical and into digital media. I resisted for a long time. I'm a late adopter generally. When I finally did it, it was...a capitulation, I think: to the ways convenience, and also money, have shifted so completely into the digital realm. It tired me out to think about it: shifting platforms, the unreality of digital ownership, the built-in ads. It still does.
I too have kept all my old CDs, and this past year I've begun slowly to add to them again, diving back into that embarrassing, enthralling realm of personal taste. I use YouTube music, which I hate, to check out new artists I run across elsewhere, and if I love what they do, I buy a physical album directly from them.
I've considered purging the old collection as well, getting rid of those albums I thought I should like but didn't love, or the things I've truly outgrown. But who knows what I might want to rediscover—or laugh about—in another decade?
I think about this all the time. Music used to BE my life. I was going to be a rock star and write books on the side. My friends and I moved to Seattle to do just that, were there during the big Seattle Thing in the 90s but only ever lived on the fringes. I STILL play music in a rock band and I love it, but when it comes to listening to music, I just don't do it. I miss stores with rows and rows of records and CDs. I love to see records making a comeback, but they largely a boutique item it seems for folks with more disposable income than me and are out of my budget.
Music for me, at least the buying and taste-making, is a role like a very familiar place that I used to spend a ton of time in with the love of my life but she left me, and now the memories are so thick—people no longer in my life, friends who were huge part of my musical life who have died, etc.—that I just can't go there very often. When I do, it's mostly wistful.
Lyle Lovett! While completely immersed in that Janes Addiction, Tool, RHCP, Faith No More scene (I know, seriously channeling my inner dude-bro with a tribal tattoo) still loved Lyle and his weird musical wordplay and slightly skewed worldview. I wish music meant as much as it used to, they say that your tastes tend to solidify (or stagnate) at around 30. I'd push it out a few years but I'm at the age where I do less exploring of new stuff I might like and more exploiting the music I know I still love.
I kept all my high school/college CDs—I just couldn't bear to part with them, even as iPods and then streaming came onto the scene—and a couple of years ago "upgraded" my ride to a 2007 Subaru with a CD player (the previous one only had a tape deck). It's been so much fun to sift through my collection and grab a few discs at random so I can rediscover them while I drive. So much music that I loved 20 years ago but had forgotten about ... and I can still remember all the words to sing along! I'm glad I didn't give in to the occasional impulse to ditch the discs.
I love this! I do something like this too. Occasionally it's incredibly embarrassing; it's always an emotional ride.
Being that I was unable to afford CDs myself, I used to LIVE for those long trips for basketball or church where I could borrow CDs and burrow into the corner with my shitty player. You had different sources for different types of music. Katie had a cool older brother who was into the scene, so I'd borrow The Get-Up Kids from her. Chris had pop sensibilities, maybe I'd see if any other songs on that Semisonic album were any good. Phil loved Pearl Jam, let's see what their deal is. It was a completely unique sense of community, and I loved it.
I feel this so much. And I still have my Case Logic suitcase filled with my cassette collection from the early-mid 90's. It takes up space that I don't have, but I simply can't part with it. My best friends and I almost solely communicated via mix tapes when we all left for college. That is a lost art form I truly miss.
The 2-disc Essential Simon and Garfunkel was the first CD I ever bought when I was 10. I listened to it often enough that I could sing back most of it from memory. Then didn’t listen it thoroughout the Deleted Years but somehow moved it from CD to Google Music (now going away). Stumbled upon it again in 2016 and was shocked at how all of it came flooding back immediately.
My mom used to have a 2-disc Simon and Garfunkel collection on (not sure if it's the same one) whenever she wanted to seriously clean house. I'd be out playing, hear the music through the open window, and sneak in to catch her singing along.
Related: this interactive study on identifying generational gaps in music is really neat
https://pudding.cool/2020/04/music-challenge/
Something I started doing a few years ago is making a playlist of all the songs I'm deeply into in a given year. So there's a 32 playlist and a 31 playlist, etc. (though several playlists got lost in the iTunes to Spotify shuffle and computer death). It's neat way to record these things and have a record you can come back to.
I loved this take - and made me remember the New Radicals album that enabled me to deal with so much change and trauma in 1999-2001, when coming of age for me from middle school into high school hit critical mass, right before the world changed in so many ways.
I had the physical CD - I remember finding it in the summer of 2001 in the "bargain" section at a Hastings Book & Music store in my tiny town in Nebraska (this was a few years past their peak radio hit "You've Get What Your Give") and rediscovered the joy it brought me then, and then again.
I'm not sure what made it happen, but Spotify shuffled a song from that album onto a playlist in the fall of 2016, right before the election. That CD was long gone, but the memory not so. I was hopeful, and was transported immediately to that hopeful time of change in my life 15 years prior. I left that album on repeat all through the rest of the year when the news just got worse and worse ...
Music is so powerful, you're all right. It's the only thing that really let's me cry ... and I'm completely OK with that being my taste.
Music is so powerful.
I grew up in an extremely musical family. My parents met in a traveling opera company. My dad taught college music theory and directed choirs. It’s an old quote about Duke Ellington that his instrument was the orchestra. Dad’s was concert choirs. Mom worked outside of music, but she sang in dad’s choirs.
Growing up, I didn’t know there was music outside of musicals or symphony until I was like 11 or 12. I discovered the radio first, spent a few months with the pop greats, and then I befriended some nerds at a local CD warehouse and fell all the way into punk. I loved all of it. I love all of it still. I know my tastes are heavily shaped by my parents. I think the reason I’m kind of repelled by musicals as an adult is because I’m resentful? Parents who like to be on a stage also like to sing musicals directly into your face, and, to an adolescent’s horror, to the cool friends I wanted to be cool with. And then they want to make you sit still and watch them for every three hour preformance twice a week for eternity. To give them a break, as young musicians, they really couldn’t afford childcare. Fine.
My sister adores musicals, opera, symphony, dance. It worked with her. But my brother and I wholesale rejected it all.
I want to keep the rest brief. This essay has so much to it. I had to quit so much stuff to become pregnant. I didn’t miss alcohol. I liked eating healthy. I didn’t notice I’d stopped listening to music. A big part of it was the 2016 election. I started consuming news at a level I never had before. That was part of it. But a part of it, too, was being enthralled by the whole new world of parenting where I had to be very quiet for so much of the time.
I always had very loud jobs with a lot of music and people. Music at work and at home just fell away for 4 years when I became a stay at home mom. And now it’s back like it never left. At least, at home. Which I’ve barely left for six months. I had to change, or quit so many thing consciously that this one enormous part of my identity slipped away without notice.
It came back. My kids are 3 and 5 and in preschool 5 days a week, and I’ve had time like I’ve never had time before. Because of covid, and the horrors and misery of the news, I’ve been listening to music obsessively. I want to pour my soul out in this comments section about how much music has been integral to this moment. I feel like you hit on so many huge things at once, the way you always do. Thanks for writing it!
"Do you miss music? Not just background music, but music that you really love?"
This reminded me a bit of a great essay I read in Man Repeller back in 2018: https://repeller.com/i-have-information-overload/
Haley Nahman wrote about how she thought her passive, algorithm-fueled consumption of media might have been contributing to her burnout (although she didn't call it burnout at that point). She used her and her boyfriend's different music-listening habits as an example. It made me start listening (really listening) to albums again!
I’ve been thinking about my loss of a music library lately. A couple of years ago my old laptop didn’t have anymore space so I was forced to move my iTunes library to an external hard drive and just use google play music. But I wasn’t able to collect my whole library there so now I feel lost- I know I have favorite albums but I usually can’t recall them when I want to listen to something. And there are too many choices on google so I end up just listening to the same 10 or so albums over and over.
When I recently moved into a new house I found my first iPod, which still worked. I charged it and have occasionally been listening to it because it has all my music and playlists from college and slightly after (2004-2008). It’s inconvenient but special.
Related- did you ever encounter mytunes in college? Somehow the college server would allow all the students to share music through iTunes for a brief period of time before I think they found out it was less than legal?
However, my regular rotation of music is expanding because my almost 2 year old has discovered the record player and is OBSESSED with the process- looking at the cover art, pulling the record out, helping to set it on the turntable and listening. Now I’m watching him already choose his favorite songs from our collection of favorite albums.
French immersion camp lady music! I have to know, are you a fellow Concordia Lac du Bois alum? One of the happiest times in my life was when I became the counselor singing the campers to sleep (in my case, “Downpour” by Brandi Carlile).
Reading this was so comforting. Remembering ripping songs from the radio, and Case Logic and the tape deck adapter. My car's tape deck was wonky so you had to put the tape in *just* right to get it to catch. Also, everyone should know that the #ThrowbackThursday playlist on Spotify today is a best of 2007 mix and I'm listening to it after reading this this morning. It's poppy and wonderful--these are the songs I listened to my senior year of college.
As for my actual taste-making. I had much older (Gen-X) siblings. My sisters would crank Aretha Franklin and we'd dance while we baked, then all the angsty 90s rock was in rotation too. Johnny Cash and other folk too. There was also a lot of Boomer-parent music. Including Lyle Lovett!! But, a lot of Paul Simon, Elvis (my dad was a very big pre-Vegas Elvis fan). Lots of Blues, and a lot of Classical music. I remember the way the corner with the stereo and all my Dad's CDs smelled and looked (sort of orderly, but really a mess, much like his office. My Dad was more formative than my mom, which is interesting because now she loves *my* (mostly indie/folk/mom pop) music because it's "calmer" than my Dad's taste.
I also remember the shame of not having any of my own music, and not really having any "cool" music one summer when my cousins were visiting and digging through the CD collection. I didn't personally *own* any music until Mariah Carey Music Box (1993, I was 9).
I feel like with current music-listening tech it is both too hard and too easy to get to music. I can listen to SOMETHING really easily, but its hard to proactively choose a collection that's my personal taste and not an algorithm or just the same one album over and over.
I recently started reading more fiction and that helped address my burnout for the same reason you're talking about here. A way to regain myself and something I used to really love but got squeezed out by hustling.
Too hard and too easy! YES. I hadn't figured out what the issue was, but that describes my feeling as well. Everything is so fleeting--oh, I like this song generated from an algorithm and I think I'll look up the band. But then, then baby needs dinner and the 3 year old is screaming for Frozen. I rely almost exclusively on a few reliable artist-focused Spotify playlists, which feels like good middle ground but I also feel like it's not intentional and I'm missing something.
The "deleted years" is interesting to me... I was in high school in the mid 00s and I can remember pretty well what music I was listening to each year bc I made highly curated mix CDs (complete with themes and titles like "Wanderlust" and "Heat Waves" lol) which then transformed into highly curated iPod playlists. In collage, I could live in certain albums and playlists for months, consumed while walking across campus. I still have my iPod from 2010-ish and I can revisit those playlists. It's such a gift from my past self.
This story is so VERY familiar. Same era, different artists, same obsession.
For me, the "lost years" are directly traceable to shifting away from physical and into digital media. I resisted for a long time. I'm a late adopter generally. When I finally did it, it was...a capitulation, I think: to the ways convenience, and also money, have shifted so completely into the digital realm. It tired me out to think about it: shifting platforms, the unreality of digital ownership, the built-in ads. It still does.
I too have kept all my old CDs, and this past year I've begun slowly to add to them again, diving back into that embarrassing, enthralling realm of personal taste. I use YouTube music, which I hate, to check out new artists I run across elsewhere, and if I love what they do, I buy a physical album directly from them.
I've considered purging the old collection as well, getting rid of those albums I thought I should like but didn't love, or the things I've truly outgrown. But who knows what I might want to rediscover—or laugh about—in another decade?