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My old not-so-trusty computer died the other day after seven-plus years of service and frustration.  Stupidly, I hadn’t backed up much of anything on that machine, so I am now starting over from scratch.  Most of my documents and music downloads are history, unless I can find and pay for a computer Jedi to ferret-out the files somehow.  I’m not holding my breath.

Anyhow, this gave me a chance to get a new computer with a much larger hard drive—I now also have an external backup drive to avoid some of the old mistakes—and I started the process of loading my old CDs into the new machine.  Many of the old discs are scattered and can’t be found right now, but I still have the bulk of my collection that I built as a teenager and into my twenties.

When I was in high school, tapes, specifically mix-tapes were the thing to do.  You picked and chose good (ok, desirable) tracks off CDs or other tapes and make a 60 or 90 minute tape.  Once the tape-deck went dinosaur, it gave way to the mix-CD.  Nice, but not as comforting or strategy-minded.  Now it is iTunes playlists, which are even more impersonal.

The goal, I guess, was to pile up tracks, so that you’d get enough to make a viable mix-tape you could play in a CD player-free car.  We even taped off the radio, and my favorite tape in high school was one of those that someone left in my car—thick with Petty, the Stones, and Zeppelin as I recall.  One of my tape players ate that one, so it is gone.

While I usually bought album-length CDs, I remember buying a couple singles at Tower Records—songs that had heavy radio airplay.  (Mildly regrettable choices such as Boys II Men’s “Motownphilly” and EMF’s “Unbelievable” both come to mind.)  The idea of the single was that it was cheaper and sometimes you got another song or two or different mixes of the same song where you couldn’t get it elsewhere.  Most of all, it was a matter of only spending a couple bucks rather than the $10 to $15 or so for the full album where there was a chance that the rest of the songs stunk and you’d have to pop the CD in and out constantly if you didn’t want to repeat it over and over.  (If you are out there, Mr. Big, you were the bane of my existence for a few weeks after I realized that you only had one half-way decent song, but good on you as you did get my money.)

So, toward the end of high school, I’d realized the error of my ways (probably just after the Joe Diffie purchase, where even the album version of “John Deere Green” was different than the radio version) and started to refine my tastes a little bit more.  All I bought from there on out—until the last couple of years and the advent of iTunes—were albums.  (The salad days of the pre-Napster-crackdown made my catalog more eclectic as well.)  I figured, rightly so, that I could listen to the bulk or entirety of these discs and rarely be disappointed.  While this approach possibly pigeonholed me where my tastes were concerned, I was going off to college soon and was determined to let my musical tastes speak for me in a way…but I wasn’t fully committed.

Sure, I had many of the same albums that everyone seemed to have in high school, though I stayed away from the ubiquitous Steve Miller Band “Greatest Hits” and Bob Marley “Legend” because hearing any of those songs—much like the Dave Matthews Band fad of the mid-to-late-nineties—made me cringe.  The music was probably good, but I just couldn’t get past the repetitive nature of it all.

Well, the chickens came home to roost my sophomore year in college, where in the common room of our suite, Dave Matthews Band played ad nauseam and in the northeast corner of my bedroom, the dulcet tones of Chris LeDoux coming out of my Magnavox stereo nearly drove my roommate, Jon, crazy.  I settled down a bit, but would usually keep at least three LeDoux CDs in the 7-disc changer—because it was mine, I guess.

In the last few years, I have bought actual CDs about as often as I go to the movies, which is to say that I count both on one hand.  I have utilized iTunes to buy a few albums and a number of compilations from artists I enjoy such as Van Morrison, Waylon Jennings, and Sam Cooke.  Price and the ease of the transaction were the chief reasons that I went to iTunes.  Matter of fact, the CDs that I’ve bought have largely been from online retailers looking to unload their wares cheaply, as well.  Off the top of my head:  Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers “Anthology,” a 3-CD set of rarities by members of The Highwaymen (Willie, Waylon, Cash, Kristofferson), a Waylon Jennings tribute album “I’ve Always Been Crazy,” Rick Danko’s “Times Like These,” Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” (essentially a greatest hits), and a 3-CD set of Dean Martin’s greatest hits (to replace a similar set that I thought was lost at the time).

Pandora, Yahoo LaunchCast, and other online music players also opened my mind a little.  I heard a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita” by Dwight Yoakam that about crippled me.  I had to have it, so I hopped on iTunes and the only place I could find it was on an album by a fellow named Flaco Jimenez called “Partners.”  Well, “Partners” is Jimenez—a fantastic tejano-style accordianist in his own right—playing with a number of other artists on each song, sort of a duets-type album.  Most of the music is not amongst my tastes, needless to say, not that it is bad, I just don’t care for it a whole lot.  I stopped again, like I did after the Joe Diffie purchase, of buying an album based on one song.

For a while, maybe a year or two before my old desktop finally met its maker, I just listened to the few singles I’d captured before the Napster crackdown and the few singles and albums I’d bought on iTunes.   Occasionally, I’d turn on Pandora, but most of the music I had now was coming over the airwaves once again off m XM Radio.  I was content.  Still am, as a matter of fact.

This new computer, however, gave me a chance to load in my old CDs that I hadn’t listened to in a number of years because I had enough music on my old computer and coming over the XM.  (The CD player in my car finally stopped working a few years ago, as well, so most of my CDs were filed away in some manner.)  The bulk of my Napster captures are gone…perhaps I was sprinkled with a little karma dust.

I had bridled against the iTunes monster-catalog that is rather in vogue these days, but meanwhile I had no real strategy on how I was going to enjoy all of the music I’d collected over the last two decades or so.  My mother got me an iPod Shuffle for my birthday this year and that made it possible for me to get my iTunes purchases portable, and opened up another world of sorts for me.  So, I swallowed my pride and started inserting discs within the last couple of weeks.  The iTunes service does a nice job of retrieving the information, but there was still some manual input needed, nevertheless I now have most of my music at my fingertips rather than at a distance where I have to go through the machinations of walking to get the jewel case, opening it, inserting the discs, and searching for tracks.

Far from making me more frustrated, now that I have become one of the Apple-addled masses, I am thoroughly joyful when I get to hear one of the twelve Chris LeDoux albums coming over the speakers.  (I have a few more that I have yet to track down.)  When I hear something off of “Shotgun Willie,” the “Honeysuckle Rose” soundtrack, or one of the “Super Hits” collections by Willie Nelson—even the gospel album he recorded with his sister, Bobbie—I know why I love his music so much and why I’ve been to see him in concert five times (rather than hearing some of his new experimental music that doesn’t hold much water in my opinion).

In a crazy world and a scattered life in many respects, embracing my music once again has given me time to reflect on who I am, what I was, and what I may become.  My music tells me about me.  I don’t need it, like I once thought, to tell others about me.  I guess it is with the same methodology that I keep all of my worn out hats and t-shirts, too.

As my life ebbs and flows, the music is constant.  It recalls emotion and life’s experiences.   Maybe I’ll never know exactly what prompted me to get back into nostalgia-mode, but as Neil Diamond sings on (my recently imported) The Band’s “The Last Waltz” in “Dry Your Eyes”:  “If you can’t recall the reason, can you hear the people sing?”

Yep…that’s good enough for me.