Musical Archeology

It all started with a box…

I’ve had a box in my various dwellings for years. I think this box was packed up maybe in 2010, maybe in 2007? I honestly don’t know. But it’s a box that has been sealed up, labeled, and moved. It’s lived in two apartments in New York (upstate not the city, I’ve never been that cool), an apartment in Michigan, a house in Michigan, and then my garage back here in upstate NY. I knew what was in the box – at least in theory.

I knew it was all the CDs that I’d acquired over the years from my teens, through college, and into my early 20s. I’d found various CDs over the years, things I’d burned, things that ended up in piles and stacks outside of their jewel cases, but with the prevalence of streaming and digital music the need to dig out a CD and find something to play it in was seriously diminished. Heck, my current car doesn’t even have a CD player and at this point I have two record players in my house and zero CD players.

Music is a mostly digital medium now – it’s everywhere and at the tap of a button or a yell at a digital speaker, you can be listening to anything your little heart desires. Digital music is how the world works now- gone are the days of going to the record store with your friends, trading albums, making mix tapes, listening to a demo CD on the headphones in the corner to see if you can vibe with the album in a few seconds of listening. I was in a record store a few weeks ago, the store where I’d hang out with my delinquent friends in our teens and buy the latest punk, ska, and hardcore albums of the 90s and it struck me just how much I missed that feeling, that experience. In that one afternoon I was 16 again, flipping through stacks and stacks of records looking for exactly the thing I was looking for that I would listen to for hours. I’ve had a thought about a way to relive some of those moments and share what I consider the most personal things about me, through the lens of the music that has been a constant companion in my life.

On a whim recently I brought that box in from the garage. I don’t think I’ve opened it for over 10 years so the contents of it were shocking and brought back feelings and emotions. Almost every album in that box I could remember what I was thinking when I bought it, why I bought it, and what it meant to be. Some of the albums in that box are incredibly important to me – often being the soundtrack of the worst moments of my life. I found a CD in there of a band I don’t remember listening to since high school – they’re not on any streaming services. I might have one of the few physical copies of that CD left in the entire world. Some of these lived in my car and were my companions on my 6 hour commutes to and from college and on various road trips to Boston, Montreal, Baltimore, and more. The music on these CDs is what got me through the best times in my life, and some of the worst. And some of it? Well some of it is just… not the best music in the world but I bought it for some reason.

I had to listen to some of these albums, but as mentioned previously I don’t have a functioning CD player in the house. I can listen to any vinyl no problem – but a CD, that’s a challenge. I remembered that during 2020 I’d rebuilt my old 12″ PowerBook G4 – my first real big purchase after college. This computer was my daily driver home computer for years and I was hoping that it had a working CD player that could help facilitate listening to some of these CDs. I went up to the 3rd floor to find it, dug through a million boxes to find the one charging cable that still works, and booted the thing up. And it worked. I grabbed my Grado SR80x headphones, plugged them in, popped in a CD and was instantly transported back to how I listened to music for the longest time. And it felt amazing.

All of this is leading up to whole point of this post and this blog and this project. As I started rummaging through this box and pulling CDs out, some with stickers from the places I bought them so many years ago, I was just struck by waves of emotions and I hadn’t felt in years. So I came up with an idea. While I listen to these albums on repeat to this day, holding some of these physical copies of music in my hands stirs up so many emotions and feelings and those are things I feel like I want to share. So welcome to the project I’m calling Musical Archeology. The idea behind this is pretty simple. I’m gonna pull a CD out of the box, I’m gonna listen to it, I’m gonna write down thoughts and feelings about that album, and I’ll post them here for the world to read (or ignore). Here’s the rules for the project:

1. There’s no order to this. The order I pull something out is vibes
2. CDs will be listened to on my 12″ PowerBook in iTunes 4 and Grado SR80x headphones. If the CD is too damaged to work after some basic cleaning, streaming is acceptable and we’ll use Apple Music on my phone.
3. Thoughts and notes will be collected on paper because I also need an excuse to pull fountain pens into this. I’ll be using a Midori MD A5 notebook and my Opus 88 x Pendemic Minty.
4. I’ll tryyyyyyyy to put up a post a week, maybe more, maybe less. I have no many CDs are in that box so who knows how long this will take or how long I’ll stick with it. But I’ll try.

That’s it – that’s all the rules. I’ll start the listening and writing soon so watch this space for more to come!