I have been having a blast “forcing” myself to listen to all these old albums start to finish like we did back in the day. Sitting, contemplating, trying to remember. Some things are absolutely clear others not so much and the rest lost to the fabric of time.
It can be intoxicating. I find that if I don’t “come up for air” frequently, I experience a slight disorientation as my mind attempts to switch gears back to the present.
I think the genesis of this project started a year or so ago when Mary and I started watching Season One of How I met your Mother. In the opening of the show, “Ted” tells us that he decided to tell his kids the long version of how he met their mother because something reminded him that before he was their father, he had this whole other life. That notion really connected to me for a couple of reasons. We get so caught up in the day to day and being who we are that we can forget who we were.
The hardest part about looking back at yourself in the past is that you realize that every past version of yourself had hopes of being something in the future and none of them are how you actually ended up.
So what have we learned so far? I for one found it interesting that the technology of the era made listening to entire albums the norm. It was something that I didn’t think about at the time because shuffle hadn’t been invented. It seems that with a few exceptions, most of the music I was listening to was rather mainstream. I had already started looking for unusual things like Chipmunk Punk, whale songs and sound effects. I went from buying vinyl albums to factory cassettes and back to vinyl. I had adopted the behavior of backfilling. If I found an artist that I liked, I would in most cases buy other works from that artist.
A growing concern for me is that I’m going to overlook something. In case you couldn’t tell. I don’t do any real preperation. I haven’t carefully examined my media library sorting and pigeon holing. What you are reading are the first and only drafts. So far, I’ve avoided trying to plan things out too much. I was hoping to get some kind off free association thing going so when some thoughts pop into my head I scramble to let them fall to the page. I’m sure that it makes for some aggravating reading with all of the grammatical and spelling errors and poorly expressed thoughts. I may have discussed this already but in case I haven’t here’s what it looks like behind the scenes. I think about the particular era in questiuon. I think about the albums of that era then I select one and play it. While it is playing in the background, I try to visualize any details that I can about that album. How did I first hear of them? What kinds of things were going on while I was actively listening to that album? Often, the act of listening to the album will stir up stuff. A lot of these albums have been dormant for years and thus unspoiled by time. If a thought or emotion pops up, I started writing about it. That is about it. As always I encourage you to use the comments section to do the same.
At the end of the year, I hope to be done. Then I’ll spend the first month or two of next year and go back through as editor and tidy things up. Maybe I’ll add links to artist web pages, more info on the stuff we talked about or to where people can buy the music referenced.