When my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I went on our most recent two-month car trip around the country, in 2016, we took a picture of our beloved Honda Civic hatchback in Joshua Tree National Park. We suspected that it was approaching the end of its life, and wanted to commemorate its daring and adventurousness. And lo, just a few months later, our mechanic declared our Civic to be in hospice, and this spring, shortly before a car trip to Springfield, Missouri, it chose to breathe its last, and so we scrambled around and purchased a brand new Honda Fit, which was delivered three days before we left.
This car has no CD player.
Now, those of you who are aware that the currency of the folk community is CDs might wonder: how is this possible? CDs are eternal, are they not? Why, I believe it was Plato who said, “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and these coasters are perfect to rest my beverage on.” Or something to that effect.
The vinyl LP was introduced in 1949; the cassette tape in 1962. The CD came out in 1982, and had pretty much killed the other two by the late ’90s; and now the CD sleeps with the fishes as well. In the future, a new music distribution format will be proposed every two months, and every two months the old one will die, like goldfish. Our new car has an entertainment system: USB ports everywhere, like pores in your skin, and seventeen different ways of listening to music, including rebroadcasting it through your teeth. But no CD player.
This makes it that much harder to listen to music. Most of the time, in the car, I’m listening to podcasts – it’s less work (music is a foreground activity for me, always), and it helps me sand down the burrs of the workday on the way home. So my listening time is already precious. And now, I have to rip every single CD I want to listen to, or remember to buy it digitally in the first place, or, well, just listen to podcasts instead.
And that’s a shame, because there’s a lot of great music that my friends are making. Just recently, my old pal James O’Brien, former host of the open mike at Passim, released a new album. He and Dave Dersham and I were in a songwriting group together back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and I cannot tell you how much I learned from these two gentlemen. We were all really good listeners, and even though our styles are nothing alike – or, perhaps, because our styles are nothing alike – it made us all better songwriters.
It always comes back to the music. SWMBT and I were in Market Basket in Union Square the other day, refreshing our memories about how few people in the world actually know how to drive a grocery cart, when, in a momentarily welcome break from the likes of Maroon 5’s version of “Little Drummer Boy”, Sheryl Crow came on the PA , covering “The First Cut is the Deepest”, a profoundly uninteresting song written by Cat Stevens (!) and popularized by the ageless British nasal cavity we know as Rod Stewart. My first question to SWMBT was, “Did this song really need to be covered?”, followed very quickly by, “My lord, did she really add a sixth to the chorus harmony?” The song has one good line, and she ruined it.
I don’t get this worked up about podcasts.
This has not been the easiest of years. It started out with a trip to Cleveland in the sleeting rain to make the final substantial steps to wrap up my father’s estate, followed by a spring and summer full of emotional crises and health issues on the part of our friends and family, followed by the biennial dentist’s drill we call a federal election, capped off by more emotional crises and health issues. And the music has suffered; I wrote four songs this year, and had exactly one gig that wasn’t part of the Somerville Songwriter Sessions. This was not the year I wanted to have, but to be honest, it’s probably the year I needed.
Happy new year, everybody. Thanks for listening.