Playlists vs Albums

Voice commands to Siri do not work well in my van.  Will was in the front seat with me on a trek last week, so I asked him to find and play Jack Johnson’s album Upside Down on my phone.  With quick teen fingers, he tapped out the search, and when the song list popped up, he tapped “Shuffle.”

Shuffle? I’ve never tapped shuffle.  I play albums.  If I want the shuffle genre, I listen to the radio.  However, I rarely do that because of the commercials and the interrupting on-going commentary.  If my goal is to listen to music, I do not want the interjections of someone’s speaking voice.  There was a time in the hour-plus Rockford-to-Chicago commute some twenty years ago that I connected with radio personalities, but my drives are shorter now.  And the in-car music options are supposedly broader—particularly if you have access to a cell tower such that you can grab your music from a cloud.

My husband Bill and I have eclectic music tastes.  In the 1980’s, when it was common to give CDs to people as birthday or Christmas presents, we had a CD tower in the living room that held 100 disks.  They were roughly categorized by genres like blues, classic rock, jazz, new age, musicals, plus a couple country titles and multiple Christmas CDs. 

When we played music in our house back then, it was a sensory experience:  To study and scan that rack of titles with the familiar fonts and designs on the spines of the plastic cases was to invite previews of sound before a selection was made.  Then, with the visual choice confirmed, there was scraping of the selected hard plastic case pulled out of the metal slot, comfort in seeing familiar art on the album cover before hinging open the lid and clicking the disk up and off of the hub.  Then, finally the glide of the CD into the slot.  That whole experience reminds me of going to a video rental store on a Sunday afternoon to look for a movie to watch that night.  Choosing a video in the store and finding a CD from the tower were journeys into entertainment.  Overtures before the main event.

Albums, as they were, put the musicians and their labels in control of how we consumed music.  From the art on the album cover to the order of the songs, we took the product from the creators and popped it into a CD player where their art was delivered to us.  We listened to the albums front to back while we were driving in the car, cooking dinner, sitting around on a lazy Sunday afternoon, or having a party.  And the songs were not independent of one another; they were webbed together as one so that when one ended our mind could find the first note of the next song before it was strummed, plucked, or tapped.  Then we hummed with the first note as it was struck.

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Whether Genesis’ Trick of the Tail or Wind and Wuthering blew through the summer air of a top-down convertible, there was a cadence to the progression of the music as it was left untouched for some fifty minutes.  One artist onstage riding the airwaves for that length of time: a musician’s dream.  A musician’s dusty memory?  I recently read a headline saying Sheryl Crow was no longer going to record albums.  But she’s so young – and talented, why would she stop now?  I continued reading to see that she was only going to release singles as the market has changed in how listeners consume.  Thanks to the fingertip convenience of the likes of Apple, Spotify, Pandora, and IHeart, albums are an expiring art form. 

I know changes happen; I’m not naïve.  However, the CD – and LPs, cassettes, and 8-tracks pre-CD – gave musicians a full artistic stage.  This new rhythm of consumption reminds me of a dystopian setting where novelists lose the ability to publish books – where only short stories are allowed to be read. 

For me, Keith Urban’s hook on his newest album Graffiti U was “Coming Home” – and on his previous album, Ripcord, “Wasted Time.”  Both songs worked their magic on me: I bought the albums, albeit via a platform.  And playing the albums straight through, holy cow, I heard that man play outrageous guitar!  So, I know this musician as a vocalist and a guitarist.  Will this experience happen in the future with the consumer’s ability to build an “album” by grabbing their favorite hits from multiple artists as they build their playlists, rather than delving into an album?  The playlist is grandstanding over the album.  I see Sheryl’s point.

I admit that I have the start of a couple potential playlists rattling through my head as though in a rock tumbler. Keith Urban’s “Coming Home” and Philip Phillips “Home.”  Guns’n’Roses “Sweet Child of Mine” and Keith Urban’s “Wasted Time.”  Sometimes I think about creating collections that remind me of where or how I grew up.  However, I haven’t had the best of luck in creating playlists.  Last November, bumbling and stumbling between my library and the cloud, I started a Christmas music playlist, but it disappeared into the abyss. Perhaps it’s floating high on a summery cirrus or catapulting in the thick air between the walls of a stormy cumulonimbus.  

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And yet, truly, I have no inclination to attempt a playlist again soon.  The time has come to bring the tower down from the attic, give it a scrub, and load it up.  There’s a CD player in the corner of the kitchen with a dusty slot.  And when a CD goes in, the machine’s default is to start with the first song and proceed chronologically through the artist’s dream.

Squirrels and Gum

Last week, two events sparked in me an urge to write.    

One morning, I came out to the porch in the morning to try to write and found flecks of dirt on my bistro table’s cloth, two poop pellets on my chair cushion, and dirt spread over the cotton runner woven in 1996 by an old woman in Greece, a widow dressed head-to-toe in black.  The pretense of neither a porch nor nostalgic linens is understood by a squirrel—identified as such by a google search for “squirrel poop photo.”

Right in the middle of the big mother-in-law tongue plant, the squirrel had dug a hole in the dirt.  Did the squirrel think he planted a walnut there?  Was he scouting for a place to hide one this fall?  None of the plants have been ripped out, but their roots have been lightly roto-tilled.  Motivated by this event, I set up a table and chair in the basement facing a blank wall in an attempt to replicate the quiet room at the library where I used to write. This is a storage/hobby/multi-purpose room. But all that is at my back. Facing forward is a plain wall, blank with possibilities. And the table is pellet free. And one essay has now been written there.

After this turd discovery, I switched gears and took the July Jalopy out for a little spin to run errands.  Bill has owned a convertible ever since I’ve known him—31 years.  Both cars were introduced to society in James Bond movies.  Neither were monetary investments but rather sunny weather accessories.  Air flows through freely.  Pollen and dust land thickly.  They are meant to be driven in the sun, or in my case yesterday, between the rain drops.  The current little green jalopy is a stick shift.  Each year it physically ages a bit.  Two years ago, I noticed the seat slides a couple inches when braking or accelerating.  Last year, on the first drive of the season, I went to shift gears, and the knob from the gear shift came off in my hand.  This year, the driver’s side arm rest that you would normally grab to close the door has become unattached from the door.  Not a big deal as the top is always down, so we just make a LEGO-shaped hand to clamp over the door and pull it shut.

I turned 54 this month and while driving this low-to-the-ground ride, I wondered how many more years I could rise up from the seat to exit this jalopy.  It’s a lot like getting out of a kayak.  At the drug store, I reached down just above my knees to lock the trunk—the only place to store valuables in a perpetually-top-down convertible.  As I turned away from the car, one foot hesitated on the pivot.  I knew before I looked.  Gum.  I grumbled as I drug my foot like a maimed animal across the parking lot.  A woman passed me and our eyes met as we simultaneously said, “Gum.”  “That’s the worst!” she decreed with compassionate exhaustion in her voice. I nodded.

I continued to the curb in front of the entrance.  There I stopped and raked the bottom of my foot across the top of the curb several times. A couple came out of the store and looked at me.  Again, “Gum,” was uttered from all three of us. They shook their heads in disgust as I continued scraping.

Squirrels on the porch and gum on the bottom of a shoe are minor existential problems.  But as for the gum situation? That is one of humanity’s lowest common denominators.