I love finding things that I haven’t thought of in a long time. Every. Single. Morning. When I wake up, I have a song in my head. I don’t know how the songs get there — they’re often songs I barely know or haven’t heard in forever. I don’t know if these songs are a part of my dreams or if it’s some weird subconscious thing going on, but without fail there’s a song in my head when I open my eyes every morning. Today’s song was “the smoke alarm is going off and there’s a cigarette still burning, please tell me whyyyyy”, a song by some one-hit wonder band from the summer before my 10th grade year. I went to my old CD book, a massive suitcase-ish black leather binder that I keep stowed away in the hallway sideboard to find it so I could hear the dang thing and maybe stop the endless repeat in my head.
I found all these carefully labeled mix CDs burned from Napster and for the first time I am able to appreciate how diverse my musical tastes were in adolescence. In that binder I found Billie Holiday, 311, James Brown, Sublime, Sepultura, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Shawn Mullins, Deftones, Jewel, EVERY Barenaked Ladies album, Limp Bizkit (forgive me!!), Counting Crows, Kenny Rogers, the Lillith Fair albums from 1997, Elvis, a whole lot of Pearl Jam and about 200 other albums I haven’t thought of in years. I walked Ben through the whole binder, explaining myself (“Yeah, I really REALLY loved Limp Bizkit for a minute. Get over it.” or “I don’t know where that CD came from… That’s not my handwriting.”) He was intrigued and fascinated by what we shared in high school without ever knowing each other (or shocked by my incongruent taste, not sure which).
I pulled out a few CDs from some of my favorite junior and high school summers and saved them to my iTunes library. Who knows… Tomorrow I might have to bust out my rollerblades.