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This week, we’re listening to music I’ve discovered away from screens. At record shops, on the radio, through friends. I have some thoughts about it.
1. “Music is moral, says Settembrini in The Magic Mountain, insofar as it has the power to be both stimulant and narcotic, to wake one up to life and to put one to sleep,” writes Christian Wiman in Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair.
2. All afternoon, I looked at records. I bought ten, mostly dance and house music, but took photos of thirty-odd records that looked weird or interesting or had a good name, like Adults Only by Club 69, or a great cover, like:
Sometimes a great cover is all I need to find great music. But sometimes, behind a bad cover or a boring cover is the best album of my life.
3. At Silence Please, the DJ, Sevyn, played Endlessness by Nala Sinephro.
4. When a song I love comes on, my mind takes too long to connect the sound with information about the sound, as though pleasure and the language for what is pleasurable are set far apart, not touching. Nouns might have little to do with feelings. Notice the word “might.”
5. My Shazam history is full of songs I already know.
6. In the bathroom of a wine bar, I Shazam songs from the transistor radio that plays local stations. There’s The Boogie Train by Bohannon. Then there’s Because You Loved Me by Celine Dion. It’s a joy to hear these songs on the radio. It’s a joy, the radio. It’s a joy to return to the table and find, waiting, an order of steak frites.
7. From the poem My Story In a Late Style of Fire by Larry Levis:
Whenever I listen to Billie Holiday, I am reminded
That I, too, was once banished from New York City.
8. At the record shop, I buy the 12-inch that the shop guy was just playing. As the notes faded to silence, he took the record off the turntable, wiped it clean, and handed it over to me. The exchange felt devilishly simple and I waited for something to go wrong. It didn’t. The record cost only $8.
9. Records I took photos of and didn’t buy:
Heads Up - David Newman
Fool on the Hill - Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66
Spinozza - David Spinozza
Baya - Ben Brako
Organ, Chicago, December 1959 - Milton Buckner
Talk To Me, Tiger! - Rita Moss
Sonny - Sonny Stitt
Finger Painting - Earl Klugh
Memphis - Petula Clark (which is very, very nice)
Armed and Extremely Dangerous - First Choice
Let’s Do It Again - The Fatback Band
Goodbye Stranger - Pepsi & Shirlie (very 80s music video)
Return to Romance - Nana Mouskouri
Dancin’ & Prancin’ - Candido
Himmatwala (Bollywood soundtrack)
In Love - Nora Christopher
10. I love the feeling when a song or album is even better than the first time I listened to it. Such a relief, then, to know that I bought it and can listen whenever I want.
11. I’m coming around to the idea that good speakers might be worth the money. I’m coming around to the idea that I’d like my living room to be a place for listening. I find most organizing shelves or systems for records to be inadequate and cumbersome. Still, I buy more records. I run headlong into more problems, because those problems are lovely problems to have in the first place.
12. “Songs let you leave death, disappointment, periodontists behind for a few minutes while they carry you away. Whitman wrote, ‘The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies.’ Sometimes music whirls me to Cassiopeia and sometimes it whirls me into my own planet—if I spend too much time in cyberspace I forgot I’m on Earth, but then Woody Guthrie’s songs make me say, ‘Earth, ho!’” - From Amy Leach’s essay The Varieties of Musical Experience
13. Hearing music on a street corner is cause for celebration.
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