The Archive

I really have a hard time relating to people who are not overwhelmingly passionate about music.

I grew up in a household and an extended family made up of music lovers, which influenced my own musical obsession more than anything else. I know for sure that my freakishly encyclopedic knowledge of music comes from trying to keep up with the example set by so many of my older cousins and their collections of records and concert t-shirts. I could not even guess how many of my relatives are musicians themselves. They are the reason I was listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 in second grade.

I know music the same way obnoxious face-painting superfans know sports statistics. For example, I could not care less where Chad Greenway went to college and how many NFL teams he's played for, but I can tell you that C.C. DeVille played the guitar solo on Warrant's song "Cherry Pie" even though he was a member of Poison at the time, and that he did one more album with Poison after that before being kicked out of the band and was replaced by Richie Kotzen, who was subsequently kicked out of the band for messin' around with the wrong girlfriend backstage. While watching Rihanna on Saturday Night Live tonight, I knew that the honest-to-God guitar hero in her live band is Nuno Bettencourt, the lead guitarist for Extreme, who has also played with Dweezil Zappa, DramaGods, Mourning Widows, and played the souped-up guitar on the remixed single version of Janet Jackson's song "Black Cat," while the album version of that song had guitar work that I believe featured Jellybean Johnson, who was also a member of The Time.

Do you see what I'm talking about here when I say freakishly encyclopedic and obsessed?

I am eternally lucky that one of my best friends is at least as obsessed as I am, if not more so. He values the same things about music as I do, and in recent years has had more influence on the divergence of my music library than anyone, and I know he would say the same thing about me. I'm happy to see this interest spreading further down the generations into Nephew #1, and I take no small amount of credit in making it happen, from buying him his first actual rock CD (Green Day's "International Super Hits") to Christmas gifting him with the first year of his subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. And now this kid on the verge of 16 is a capable enough musician on three different instruments to sit in when our talented cousins all get together to causally play and easily hold his own.

The reason all of this is coming up today is because of my 2010 New Year's Resolution. I don't know if I'll be able to keep it, but I'm sure going to try. My resolution was -- and still is -- to NOT buy more than one new album per month this year. Now, I said BUY. In my rule book, this excludes gift cards, which is lucky since my credit card bonuses translate into earned iTunes gift cards. Like I said, obsessed.... Anyway. I made the resolution because I was listening to some music over winter break and discovered that more than half of the songs in my iTunes library had not been played in well over a year. This added up to an astonishing number of songs that I never really learned that well in the first place, or songs that are such a deep and meaningful part of my personal history that they deserve more than being ignored. So I put together a playlist that keeps tracks of which songs haven't been played since my hard drive crashed in August of 2008 and I had to transfer my library back from my iPod after repairs were made. It added up to more than 7,000 songs.

Part B of my resolution became "listen to every one of these songs at least one time." And so far, both resolutions are working great. First of all, there hasn't been any new music worth buying I've come across yet, so that's no problem. And secondly, going through all of this older music has been an amazing experience. I've come across songs that were once favorites but don't hold up over time at all. But I can remember vividly the periods of my life when they were favorites, and this brings back the emotional ties I had to whatever was going on that somehow imprinted on those songs and gave them such meaning. I'll occasionally find the fingers on my left hand flying through quick bits of guitar solos I haven't heard in God knows how long, and yet somehow my brain still remembers the sad little attempts at air-guitar I made while listening to that song and its solo back when it was heavy in my rotation. I'll remember loving an album so much that I would buy it for someone for their birthday or Christmas or whatever, only to be met by blank stares when said gift recipient would look at the cover and have no idea who the artist was, even though I was so sure they were going to love it because I did. I'll remember that the Rush song "Manhattan Project" was going through my head earlier in the evening before my sister went into labor with Nephew #1, just because of the line "and the course of history / would be changed forever more" felt so appropriate. Then I'll listen to an old Survivor album that I had on cassette in college, and I'll wonder why I tried so hard to find it again because wow, is it the very defintion of mediocrity.

So today's message? Dig out your old music sometime, and give it another listen. I promise you'll be in for some surprises.