one thing at a time

Lately I have been remembering how things were when I was younger. A time when every dollar I found went towards a new cassette or baseball cards, when I would sit by the radio every evening and record songs from top ten countdowns and underground hip-hop shows. I would spend hours listening to the same album, the entire album, and then spend weeks listening to it again simply because I only had so many of them and it often was just easier to listen to the entire album rather than FF my way to a specific song. This is how I memorized just about all of the lyrics to Cooleyhighharmony and The Low End Theory. And that's music that will stick with me forever. There are memories in those albums, regardless of how I feel about the music today. I can see myself sitting in the back of the minivan with my walkmen and headphones riding through Tennessee. I can picture the cassette in my hand while I stood in the check out line at the new & used tape store near my grandparents house in Aspen Hill, MD.

This week I was at home scrolling through my iTunes library and I came across Damien Jurado's Caught in the Trees. I've had this album in digital form since it was new in 2008 and I don't think I've listened to it in it's entirety until Monday night. That just doesn't seem right, particularly because Caught in the Trees is a pretty nice record. I've made this a habit. I grab and collect music everywhere I go. A download here, a cd there, a sudden obsession with Jackson Browne and before I know it I've got a library of music I'm mostly unfamiliar with and rarely listen to.

I've been trying to decide who to blame for this. The first suspect is the internet. I'm a relatively new Jackson Browne fan. When I started listening to his music I almost instantly acquired four of his albums with one click of the mouse. Music has never been so easy to acquire. Of those four albums, I've taken the time to listen to two of them, maybe. Of those two, I've taken the time to listen to one more than once.

The second suspect could be the optical disc or digital media in general. Let's just call it "format". It's so easy to skip around from one song to the next, from one album to another that actually sitting down and listening to an entire album has become a rare occurrence for me. The only time it really ever happens is when I'm in the car and even then I often tend to listen to some mix of songs and various artists that I've compiled from the digital files on my computer. Skipping through songs was kind of a pain with cassettes so, I just let them roll. There is, of course, a raging argument about how digital media has killed "the album". I'm not so sure about all of that, but it does seem to require more effort on the part of the listener to experience an album through and through. I will say that when folks like Radiohead record a song and then make it available for download the next day it kind of takes the fun out of it for me. I want a compiled collection of recordings all created with the same goal in mind - release to the public. I like the release part. A new album from a favorite band should be an event, something to look forward to.

The third suspect would be me. I've become greedy. I've become lazy. A lot of the time, I allow the many distractions of our digital world to shrink my attention span. Focusing on one thing becomes difficult. I think I should be multi-tasking, or at least that's what I've been trained to do. I grab music without knowing anything about it or having listened to one note of it previously. Then I let it sit on my computer for months at a time while I move on to the next thing. I have a ton of music and listen to portions of it all the time, but I don't know most of it. What a failure...

I plan to fix this. Here's how. I'm going to choose three albums a week and listen to them and only them in the times I would normally be breezing through something else and not really be paying attention to it. And, I'm going to do this regardless of how much I decide I like the album. I'll give it one week. So, three albums, on repeat, for one week. This week I have selected Damien Jurado's Caught in the Trees (since he sorta started all of this), best new music-dubbed Local Natives' Gorilla Manor and Jackson Browne's self-titled debut from 1972. I'll let you know how it goes.

Jamaica Say You Will - Jackson...

Wide Eyes - Local Natives

Gillian Was A Horse - Damien J...