Воскресенье 18 Дек 2011, 22:21

My iPod somehow deleted EVERYTHING on it the other day after malfunctioning for a good 12 hours every time I would try to listen to a Broken Social Scene album. So lame.

Fire Eye'd Boy officially killed my iPod. Now it's hard to listen to without the fear of it breaking again though that is unlikely.

I've got lots of music that no one's heard of (not on purpose, just what happens to speak to me when I hear them on whatever I'm listening to - be it a BBC podcast, a CBC podcast, other bands being friends with them, etc.)

This is why it would be devastating (God forbid) I should ever REALLY lose my record collection. I have albums that perhaps only 500 copies were ever made and were important to me in my high school years, many albums are signed by the bands (unintentionally - this is what happens when you tend to pre-order), and then there is a band that I so dearly love that is beyond obscurity - at least in the United States.

I had to re-upload all of my burned copies of UK band, Rhode Island the past half hour or so. They have an expansive collection, mostly of EPs spanning from 2004 until now. Unfortunately, I am less tech-savvy than I realize and somehow didn't burn the song information onto the disc with all those EPs (and an album or two) and it's been a labor of love to rename the songs in iTunes.

With any other band I might just be annoyed and forget about renaming the songs to I know which one is which; yet with them I am compelled to rename each and every song even inserting the year it came out.

Going through and titling them all, I usually remember exactly where I was when the EP came out, what time of year it was, where I was living, what I was doing… It's odd how such an obscure band can have such a life-long effect on you and tied in with so many moments.

Many songs that come out, lots of people have memories attached to - be it Lady Gaga, Katy Perry or much less mainstream artists like Ride or Saint Etienne… but then again there are thousands and thousands that all have memories connected with those songs.

I'm not trying to be like, "I'm unique! I have a unique experience" but in a sense I do with these songs. I'm one of a little over 2,000 listening to these songs, according to last.fm.

I have spent countless hours wandering the streets of Chicago listening to these songs. I have probably spent even more hours thinking about the lyrical content and having little epiphanies about them - ("Oh, that's what they mean!") and probably, collectively, being moved to tears by some of the songs for hours.

I'm sure many people have a band of this sort - especially if they're a music nerd or always on the lookout for underground music but it's weird to think that I'm one of so few spending so much time with a specific song, a specific album.

I still have the Polaroid they send me from England of a graveyard which appears to be taken right before dusk. I was initially mildly spooked that I ended up with the graveyard one (as they had many) but it actually correlates really well to many of the themes I respond most to in their songs. They're one of those very few bands in my life that get me to thinking so much (and end up writing about).

The Polaroid hangs in my kitchen, unframed by the light switch.

Anything else they have ever sent me is tucked away in a drawer and kept safe along with multiple copies of the same EP, just in case.

I got into an argument with someone at work about how if I lost/got stolen or had my record collection destroyed somehow there would be many things I could never find again.

This person argued that it's "pretty easy nowadays" to replace anything you had ever owned, but that simply isn't true. The internet has made it far easier to fall in love with a band that you can't find in a record store or after hunting down a specific record shop that only has one copy, or finding it for $80 on Amazon.

I've gone off on a tangent, but it makes me think of how impermanent lots of things are.

My iPod will take a few months to get back to the way it was before it conked out on me, but right now it's making me appreciate the fact that I still do collect actual albums rather than just download.

And I'm rediscovering music along the way.