Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Music Nostalgia

It was probably triggered by having Miss L living with us for the last few months. At 13 she's into fairly thrashy music. Which got me thinking about the first music I started listening to when I was 13.

The timing of this event was fairly fortuitous as it coincided with my recent discovery of the website mp3search.ru where you can pick up vitually any album you want for one dollar!! I've been running around this site like the proverbial kid let loose in a candy store. I'm downloading everything I can lay may hands on. Good things don't last long and I remember the sudden end of Napster
only too well.

So I been downloading all the very first music I listened to. AC/DC -Let There be Rock, Uriah heep - Innocent Victim and Led Zeppelin 2. Man this music is still good. Knocks the shit out of a lot of current music. And there's nothing quite like music to stir up old emotions - especially 13 year old emotions.

Although most of these bands have all got "Greatest Hits" compilations I skip those and download the exact albums I had. The actual sequence of the songs has a strong recollection element in addition to the actual songs themselves. I'm loving this shit.


Other albums that shaped my life:

Jethro Tull - Aqualung

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

Billy Joel - The Stranger

Supertramp - Crisis? What Crisis?

Kate Bush - The Kick Inside

Later:

Neil Young - Rust Never Sleeps

Bob Marley - Exodus

Peter Tosh - Bushdoctor

Joan Armatrading - Walking Under Ladders

There are many, many others too but these ones stick out. And they'll ALWAYS sound good to me because they are intimately linked with my emotional life. My personal discography.

The really schizophrenic thing right now is that I'm dividing my time pretty much evenly between listening to classical on the one foot and hard rock on the other. Ecletic reaches new extremes!

Man, I HAVE to buy that 30gig iPod. Mrs M says (correctly) that we can't afford it right now. But I'm developing some pretty good arguments. Like as a BiPolar I need a HUGE amount of music at my fingertips in order to cover the eventuality of any mood. Like music is one of the few control dials on the personal emotion panel. If I don't convince Mrs M just now, I'll certainly convince myself.

4 comments:

  1. RUMORS!!!!! Only the greatest album ever!!!!

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  2. What exactly is nyc taxi shots saying? Did I miss something?

    I actually spent a great deal of time last year converting my old lps to mp3 on my new (used) iBook G4, and I do have The Kick Inside if you haven't been able to find it. I even included the needle dropping and lifting off at the beginning and end of each side. As for Uriah Heep, I caught them for free at an outdoor rock festival here in Daegu three summers ago. They rock! My Korean girlfriend had never heard of them and she still dug the show.

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  3. You have some good stuff there.

    I'm also a music freak, and like you, my collection is quite eclectic. And I understand 100% about wanting the original albums, and listening to them in the same order. It's powerful medicine. And at that time, albums were often put in specific order for listening integrity. We rarely said we wanted to listen to a song - it was by album side. "Songs in the Key of Life", record 2, side 1. Or Yes' "Fragile", side 1.

    Great post.

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