In lieu of spending a lot of money collecting records, I mostly spend a lot of time collecting and organizing mp3s. I have all these different itunes smart playlists so I can make my way through piles of music that I haven't heard. A lot of it is stuff I don't even like and will never listen to again.. but I just always want to hear new things.
The other day I spilled water on my keyboard and while blotting it up I accidentally deleted my shoegazey playlist. I didn't notice until it was too late to do anything. It took me a long time to think of all the possible things to add in there.
So I had to go to a previous version of my itunes library.
The problem now is that it reset the play counts on all this crappy stuff I already listened to, so it's back on my unlistened new downloads playlist. So now I'm driving around giving all this stuff a second chance.
This is inconsequential but I have nothing better to do.
I just like contemplating the different ways to enjoy music, and how they change over time. When I was a child I'd start at the bottom of the radio dial and listen to one song on each channel. It's sort of like that now except with free mp3s.
Sometimes I'll think of a song, weeks after I've listened to it, and only then do I realize that I like and want to hear that song again.
Sometimes I'll hear a song and I know I need it.
Mostly I listen to thousands of songs and forget who they're by and what they sound like, and they fade into the oblivion of my hard drive, probably forever. This is what the digital age has allowed me to do.
