malvasia bianca

When I first moved out here (summer of 1998), I didn’t listen to music much. When I was at home, my media time was largely spent playing video games; sometimes I listened to CD’s in the car, but once Liesl learned to drive, I took the bus to work. (During which I read books. Which was great. But I digress.)

In the summer of 2003, I started working at Kealia. Which wasn’t easily accessible on the bus from our old apartment, so we turned my signing bonus into a car down payment. For no very good reason, I got a radio without a CD player, so I listened to the radio going to and from work. Which was fun for a little while, but it didn’t take too long for it to get old.

So in January 2004, I bought a CD player for the car. From the only car stereo store I could find which wasn’t actively offensive. (Which is also how we ended up with two Saturns: I was planning to buy a Toyota the second time, but man, those guys were incredible. I was amused when one of the sales people put a lighted cigarette into his shirt pocket, at least. Alas, our older Saturn’s engine died earlier than it should have, so no more Saturns for us in the future. Again, though, I digress.) I have a fair number of CD’s around (mostly bought during my undergrad years), so I decided to go through the entire collection.

This took a while; my commute is pretty short, so I could only listen to about 3 CD’s a week. My pace more or less doubled a year later when I got the iPod, fortunately: I was getting a bit tired of how long it was taking. Though I was surprised at how few of the CD’s I got rid of as a result of the tour; I guess my tastes in music haven’t changed all that much over the last decade and a half. (My tastes in pop music have changed more than my tastes in classical music.)

But now I am done. Which leaves me at a bit of a loss: I have to actually think about what music I am going to listen to next. (The Zero Patience soundtrack got the nod first: “Pop-A-Boner” is a great song, though I’m sure the fact that it was one of the first CD’s on the trek so I hadn’t listened to it for two years had something to do with the choice as well.) I am struggling through, however. My music listening does seem to be a bit pop-heavy as a result, but I think that’s a temporary thing: doubtless next month I’ll go on a Shostakovich kick or something.

What is a little more annoying is that I would like to go out and buy more music, but I don’t have any great sources of recommendations right now, and I’m pretty out of touch with the last decade of music. So if everybody who reads this post could leave a comment telling me of a CD to buy, I would appreciate it. (Seriously, I would.) I don’t have any friends whom I currently spend much time talking about music with. I don’t listen to radio enough to get a feel for what new music out there I’d be interested in; I’ve been trying to get some of that information from podcasts, but with limited success. One problem with that is that I rarely hear a new song more than once; that’s almost never enough to get me to want to buy a CD, unless the song is really distinctive. And I just haven’t shifted into the mode of buying individual songs instead of individual tracks, for various reasons. If I’d been thinking, I would have rated my entire CD collection while listening to it and let Amazon give me some suggestions; oh well.