True story: I was shipped off to day camp at the ripe old age of three years old. I don’t remember any discussions leading up to the decision, or even being put on the bus one morning and brought to this new place. I just remember crying when I got there, everyday, for the first week or so.
At a certain point, one of my counselors figured out that she could get me stop crying if she sang/performed Barry Manilow’s Copa Cabana for me. I think by week 2 I didn’t even need the Copa, I was just happy to go to camp. Still, that’s my earliest memory of music making everything alright.
By or eight or nine years old, I would spend nights in my bedroom, with my hand-me-down boom box tuned to Z-100 or WPLJ and the tape deck on REC+PLAY+PAUSE. At the end of each song my finger would hover over the pause button, ready to start recording should a megahit like Eye of the Tiger or Don’t You Want Me start playing. To have these tunes in my possession was no small feat.
At 14, I looked forward to the weekly chore of the mowing the lawn, for the sole reason I got use my walkman and get lost in the Beatles. At 15, I got an upgraded dual cassette boom box that was smaller and lighter than the 1982 model. The two-deck setup let me start making proper mix tapes, while the portability let me take those mixes to the shower with me. I’d cue up a three or four song run that fit whatever mood I happened to be in.
I’m not here to romanticize the simpler time of mixing electricity with indoor plumbing, but I do miss the deep knowledge I developed about the music I was listening to at the time—the building of an internal library of Stuff I Liked, cataloged somehow in my brain. That library still exists, though it’s much more scattered, if not outright ephemeral. The coupling of a 53 year old brain that’s been through some stuff with near-instant access to almost every recording known to man has kind of overloaded the circuits. I am at capacity. The system is overwhelmed. Most of my listening these days is to podcasts.
I don’t really have a specific goal in mind with this other than to shrink my music listening world to something I can control. For whatever reason, I decided I can do that one shower, and four songs, at a time. If I curate a small list of old favorites and new listens each day, I might actually know what I’m listening to. I might even get curious to hear more. Guess I’ll have to shut up first.