Fresh news: Let there be no doubt that my interview with Jay Farrar was the driving factor in Son Volt’s decision to re-unite. This is really great news!
Over the weekend I began what will end up being a somewhat major transformation of my life. I kicked off what I had thought would be an easy task – selling some of my CD’s back to a used CD store. I’ve harped a couple of times in these parts about something fairly obvious – that CD’s are a swiftly dying breed and that someday soon all our media will be stored on a central hard drive in our houses, so better to get money for the discs now before nobody will take them. I still believe it and I still believe that those small, square plastic discs will be worthless sooner than later.
However, a crazy thing happened on my way to 21st century. As I was scanning the racks of my collection and trying to decide what to sell back, I started associating certain CD’s with key moments in my life. Things like “oh, I saw these guys at The Middle East for this tour and it was great, so I shouldn’t sell this back.” Or “I met the bass player once and he was a really nice guy.” Things like that, you know? It was like I didn’t want to let the band down. Or myself.
Bottom line: I didn’t sell as many discs back as I had originally envisioned when I bought the IPod. It felt too much like I was kicking my personal history to the curb. And I love history. So this will clearly have to happen in stages. But the whole thing cast a slightly fearful cloud on my weekend – now that I am “going digital,” will I never again associate certain albums with great memories? Or will I just learn in new ways to appreciate it? Time will tell.
This is clearly a microcosm to adapting to the times we live in. I suspect in the past we saw similar instances for all major personal media change in our lives. I see it now with people my parents age (not my parents specifically) – they’re just now starting to understand the internet, some are even forgoing their land lines for exclusive use of cell phones. But it takes a while to come to grips with such a major overhaul. This must have occured in people when TV went mainstream and radio crawled into its shadow. Anyway, I am going to continue down my path. I had never planned to sell all of my CDs as some of them are just too much a part of my DNA, but time and technology will march on, with me or without me. I will create new memories in ways I probably don’t even know about yet. It’s turned out to be a sadder transition than I thought it would be, but then I think about the fact that I have just about my entire CD collection on one small piece of metal and I can listen to whatever I want whenever, wherever. Let me tell you, I’m enjoying the HELL out of that!
By the way, did you hear the news about Cat Stevens? They diverted a London-to-U.S. flight because his name was on the list of suspected terrorists. It was the name they were suspicious of, not the person. Either way, I’m sure after Stevens (now named Yusef Islam) performed his stunning rendition of “Peace Train” for the feds, everything was ok. Certainly.
Song now playing: The Clash – “Clampdown”