Comforting.

There is a scene in High Fidelity where one of the characters finds John Cusack sitting on the floor of his apartment surrounded by LP records, in the midst of reorganizing his music collection. The friend tries to figure out how it is being organized…

“Chronological? No… Not alphabetical…”

“Autobiographical.” Cusack says, explaining that he remembers when and where he got each record.

“That sounds…”

“Comforting?” Cusack says.

“Yeah.”

 

A year ago or so, I started keeping a spreadsheet on my work computer entitled “My Top 100 Albums” and began adding titles as they came to mind. As I neared the target number, I started adding columns to track what year each album was released, the genre, and other bits of data that I found interesting. It started as a way to analyze my influences. Which musical decade created the most of my influences? 2000-2009. Which year was the most fruitful for musical discovery? 2005. What gender makes up the majority of my favorite artists? 74% male. How did I discover my music? 63% of the time I discovered them myself, through articles, radio, etc. The rest of the time they were directly introduced to me by someone else.

 

But the more time I spent on this, the more it went from being a data driven project to being a source of comfort somehow. Like suddenly catching a whiff of rain, or cedar, or a certain wildflower, each of these albums shoves me back into a specific moment in time.  Each purposeful revisit evokes sights and sounds and memories.

 

Occasionally, when some of these memories come up in conversations with friends, I am encouraged to write down and share these thoughts with others. I have been skeptical that they would be of any interest to anyone else, but I have also been open to this, at least in theory. But I have always lacked some sort of cohesive structure to join the memories together. At least until now. I have organized my albums autobiographically, by the year that I discovered them. This will be the thread that will connect the thoughts and memories that I will share here.

 

So I hope you will join me in the next week or so as I write about the first album that became truly meaningful to me: Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.

Comments

M.Fernandez said…
Brooooooo!!! That’s the stuff! S&G takes me back. Good times...
12/7/20 22:34
Dad said…
That's fun. So true how music can take us back to moments or times. Thanks for sharing. -- Dad
13/7/20 09:41
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