Listening deeply

 

While I was waiting for my appointment at the Apple Genius Bar factoids were flashed on screens. You could drive from New York to San Francisco twenty five times with a 32 gigabyte ipod and never hear the same song twice, one suggested. This made me incredibly sad. As time goes on I find the patina building up on certain songs, and albums, that hearing them often (though not carelessly, as the aural wallpaper that obliterates silence in almost every public space) is a powerful and wonderful experience. The songs sink more deeply into my soul. I’m finding that about a week’s worth of music, total, is as much as I have room for in my heart.

 

When I was driving around with Nick Cave in Sydney last year, listening to the new Bad Seeds album, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! I talked about encountering his songs as they popped up in shuffle mode in my itunes library. He mentioned finding it distressing that albums aren’t listened to in their entirety, in the order that the artist intended, at least some of the time. I saw the “shuffle” phenomenon from his point of view and I’ve made it a point to listen more discerningly to records, to pay more attention. The first sample bibliostructure in my new range is an homage to Nick’s album Nocturama. The play count feature in itunes shows that in the two years I’ve had my computer I’ve listened to Nocturama and the Grinderman album all the way through more often than any other albums. (Nitin Sawhney’s Beyond Skin, Everybody Digs Bill Evans and Bruce Springsteen’s Devils and Dust and Magic are high on the list, too.)