Stop Buying CDS!!!: My Journey Through The Unheard

Chronicling my journey through the hundreds of cds I own but have yet to listen to.

There is a ritual in my house: when a pale-yellow bubble mailer arrives with the day’s post, always addressed to me and always pregnant with varying amounts of compact discs, I am inevitably admonished by my two elementary-aged daughters.

“STOP BUYING CDS!!” they bellow, in sing-song unison. I take it as a gag, though perhaps their command is based on some prescient knowledge that every bulged envelope represents their college fund’s depletion, one early-seventies King Crimson record at a time.

Either way, they are out of luck. Like Anthony Kiedis, I can’t stop, addicted to the shindig. And before you even ask, the answer is yes: I have heard of streaming services. A few years ago when I got a free Tidal¹ membership for being a loyal Sprint² customer I thought for sure that I’d purchased my last cd.

My hiatus lasted just mere months.

Before long, it occurred to me how much streaming had devalued my listening experience. I got a sort of musical A.D.D. jumping from record to record, song to song like a Pomeranian hyped up on Jolt cola. I presume that is how most people consume music these days. Either that, or they fall back into playlists heavy on music they loved in high school (which defeats the purpose of having access to nearly every piece of recorded music in history).

So I push on, accruing physical media on the regular, only pausing when yet-another discount music site I’ve been pillaging goes under (R.I.P. gohastings.com and secondspin.com) until a replacement reveals itself to me like an oasis in the desert to satiate my thirst³ (hello decluttr.com!).

This compulsion has led to a stockpile of sorts. I currently own well over 4,300 albums, of which roughly 1/4 have never met my ears, which I know is ridiculous. It just goes to show how much great music there is out there. I mean, have you heard Sinatra’s mid-60’s stuff? Or dove deep into a collection of peak-Oasis’s b-sides? Me neither.

But I will, eventually.

That’s what we’re doing here. I am going to chronicle my journey through the absurd collection of music I’ve amassed starting off with the ones I’ve made my way through during this suckhole we call 2020.

And away we go!

Let’s start with Let Love, the 12th studio album by Chicago Renaissance man, Common. The Chicago rapper/author/actor/ and star of my wife’s dreams⁴ has been a mainstay in the hip-hop world since his debut, Can I Borrow A Dollar?, dropped back in 1992. Like most veteran acts, Common’s discography is dotted with the occasional valley (Universal Mind Control, Electric Circus) among many towering peaks (Resurrection, Finding Forever, the immortal Be). The rare missteps seem to occur when Common veers a little too far away from the soulful, contemplative street-musings he’s known for in order to follow trends or appease some transient whim.

Thankfully, Let Love represents no such valley. Not a concept album, so much as a collection of songs with love as a through-line, Let Love is Common’s rebuke of our troubled times. Just a few years ago, Common scowled against a black background on the cover the aptly titled Nobody’s Smiling, but here he wears an easy grin, bathed in sunlight to represent the enlightened position he finds himself in. To him, love is everywhere; love of God, love of self, love of child, love of hip-hop and even the good love of a blue-haired woman. And the jazzy, mellow production driven by live instrumentation brings to mind the hippest college bar the cast of A Different World might go to. The head-bobbing, easy grooves help make the sometimes saccharine wordplay (“When two ships pass, one love is the flotation”) go down like a spoon full of sugar. And though it’s not all sunshine and lollipops (there are references to child molestation, infidelity and murder) Let Love‘s wide-eyed optimism is a refreshing diversion from the constant negativity we seem unable to avoid these days.

I went in blind on this one, knowing virtually nothing about Bright Eyes or singer and principle songwriter Conor Oberst. All I knew is that this album is good, at least in the eyes⁵ of those who determine what is or isn’t good. Suffice it to say I was a little perplexed by opening track “The Big Picture” which is essentially a lo-fi recording of acoustic strumming paired with some warbled coffeehouse wisdom by Conor who comes off like Bob Dylan by way of Billy Eichner. The fact that the track is eight and a half minutes long and is book-ended by two minutes of driving directions at the beginning and a minute of channel surfing at the end did not give me hope for the rest of the record.

“Method Acting,” the subsequent track, rebounds nicely and actually tramples some of the same ground as Common’s record. In Conor’s view, we are all dying and that’s OK as long as we get a chance to love and be loved (though the despondent protagonist in “You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will” might suggest it would be better to have not loved at all). Lost love is explored in the shuffling, country-tinged “Make War” while the bouncy “Lover I Don’t Have To Love” focuses on love of a drug-fueled dry-humping variety. It’s all very compelling, just not upon the first listen. It took me at least five or six times through find the charm in Conor’s stream-of-conscious existential examinations and the scattershot production techniques. I got there, I just don’t think I’ll go back anytime soon.

Dylan’s “my marriage is ending⁶” album Street-Legal, on the other hand, immediately hooked me and will have me revisiting it time and time again. Like Lifted, Street-Legal opens with a seven minute-plus opus, but where “The Big Picture” came off to me as meandering and off-putting, Dylan’s “Changing Of The Guard” rings out as a shot across the bow warning listeners that you aren’t about to get the status quo⁷. The lyrics are buried in metaphor, but seem to reference Dylan’s rejecting of the commercialization of his art, or something like that. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters are that stomping beat, those E-Streety horns and the angelic backup choir. “New Pony” commences with Dylan stating “I had a pony. Her name was Lucifer” over a syrupy blues groove. Two lines later he’s putting that pony down and it’s pretty clear that the pony is is soon to be ex-wife and the titular new pony is his hot new thang. Any question that the song is basically anything but four and a half minutes of sex is quelled by the deliberately ambiguous pronunciation of the line “She knows how to fox-trot…” I seriously did a double-take when I heard it.

You know that scene in The Wedding Singer when Adam Sandler’s Robbie Hart picks up the music sheets that Drew Barrymore’s Julia Sullivan⁸ had so thoughtfully purchased for him and than flung across the lawn when Robbie callously suggested that she was a gold digger? You know how he immediately recognizes the error of his ways and says “I AM AN ASSHOLE!” Yeah, that’s “Baby, Stop Your Crying.” For how mean-spirited “New Pony” can be perceived, “Baby” is Dylan at his most gentle and compassionate. And that’s how breakups are. Sometimes you say hurtful things, and then you apologize. You start thinking things will be all right (“True Love Never Forgets”) only to start to second guess it all (“Is Your Love In Vain?”). And then other times you ride a train through the apocalypse with God (“Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)”). And this is “lesser Dylan,” they say.

From Street-Legal to street poet, we land on Nasir, the fruit of Nas’s 2018 visit to Kanye West’s Wyoming compound. The “Wyoming Sessions” (as it has come to be known) produced five seven-track albums all produced by West. Preceded by Pusha T’s Daytona, West’s own Ye, as well as the West/Kid Cudi collab Kids See Ghosts, Nasir⁹ suffers from it’s brevity (it’s barely over twenty-six minutes in length) as well as a lack of focus. A prime example is album opener “Not For Radio.” Nas devotes much of the first verse to deifying himself (as is his predilection) and then spends verse two hopping from one conspiracy theory to the next (mainly questioning the whiteness of American historical figures). But then on “Cops Shot The Kid,” Kanye expertly utilizes a Slick Rick sample to repeatedly hammer home the song’s message and to keep Nas on task. But it’s only for one verse. Much of the record, though he reverts to the old hip-hop trope of unabashed boasting. He goes to the finest parties (“A vet stylin’ in Met Gala,” -“White Label”), vacations in the finest destinations (“Hit up the South of France after tour,” -“Bonjour”) and sleeps with the finest women (“New girl every night, two girls was every other night” -“Adam and Eve”). When done by one of the best to ever do it, it’s listenable but one can’t help but hope Nas might have more to say.

Of all the songs, “Everything” is the one that left the most lasting impression. It’s by far the longest track on the record, but that’s not what that stood out to me. It’s the chorus.

“If I had everything, everything
I could change anything
If I changed anything, I mean anything
I would change everything”

I can’t tell if it’s nonsense or one of the most profound statements ever uttered. The fact that it’s Kanye singing it only adds to the mystery. Is he confronting the fact that all his talents have given him unimaginable wealth but cannot bring back his mother and how the fame has forever stripped him of his privacy and perhaps contributed to his deteriorating mental state? Nas delivers some of his best lines on the album on the track, but nothing that lingers in the mind more than Kanye’s vulnerability when he sings “You’ll learn and you’ll live.” And therein lies the problem. For an album titled Nasir, the record is neither a showcase for it’s headliner nor the personal statement the title and provocative artwork might suggest.

Speaking of provocative album artwork! Machine Head Catharsis, the veteran Oakland-based metal quartet’s ninth studio album, lets you know off the bat with that grisly cover pic that you are in for an auditory bloodletting. And if you still weren’t quite sure of it, opening thrasher “Volatile” begins with Robb Flynn’s gravel-throated edict to “F**k the world!” Subtlety ain’t his strong suit and he proves it over and over and over again over a somewhat bloated fifteen tracks¹⁰. Stylistically, the album is all over the map. It’s almost like a Machine Head playlist on shuffle with each phase the band has gone through represented. You want thrash? There’s “Kaleidoscope” and the nearly nine-minute long epic “Heavy Lies the Crown.” Nu-metal? There’s the dumb but fun “Triple Beam.” You want some mid-tempo pummeling? There’s “Screaming At the Sun” and the title track.

And there’s “Bastards.” Ahh, what to say about “Bastards”? I once read a story about a man who broke into his neighbors house while he was high on LSD to save their dog from a fire. The thing is, there was no fire. He had hallucinated it. But hey, at least his heart was in the right place. That’s how I feel about the folk-thrash¹¹ of “Bastards.” Robb Flynn passes down life lessons to his sons in an increasingly angry and chaotic fashion, lamenting the current state of American politics and admonishing the “racists and Second Amendment thugs.” It’s all well and good, and decidedly more woke than most of Nasir, but Flynn did open himself to criticism with the use of a few racial and homophobic slurs. I opine there was no ill-intent their use, in fact his direct and blunt lyrical attack of complex and polarizing themes is appealing, but I must say it was jarring to hear at first. As I said, his heart was in the right place, and on the somewhat discombobulated Catharsis you can listen to him slice it open and bleed it out over and over again.

Speaking of discombobulation, here’s Coldplay’s Everyday Life! What’s that? You’ve never heard of Everyday Life? It dropped last November to basically no fanfare. The singles came and went, there was very little promotion and they basically didn’t tour behind it¹². The only reason I even found out about it myself is that I happened upon it in the music aisle at Target¹³. And though I just referred to it as discombobulated, I’m glad I discovered it that day at the height of the first wave of the pandemic while I was shopping for garlic pretzels and beer¹⁴ .

In contrast to Catharsis, which I believe may have benefited from a bit more focus and proverbial fat-trimming, Everyday Life‘s sudden shifts in musical style and production values bring a loose, charming aesthetic to the proceedings which have been absent in Coldplay’s recent, more pop-leaning releases.

Conceived as a double album (on a single CD) with a Sunrise and Sunset portion separated by the a thirty-seven second interlude featuring the tolling of church bells, it is hands down Coldplay’s most relaxed and experimental work in years. That isn’t to say there aren’t “Coldplay” songs in the record. “Church”, the single “Orphans” which aims to destigmatize the refugee, “Champion Of The World” and the title track all would fit that description. But then there’s “Guns” where Chris Martin treats each plucked string like a blast from an AR-15 (all the while dropping a few f-bombs) in order to satirize our insatiable lust for firearms. Then he showcases his more intimate side with the piano driven “Daddy” and the acoustic-led “Old Friends.” We also get taken to church twice; the southern Baptist variety with “Broken” and with the Catholic-choir sound of “When I Need A Friend.” There are two instrumentals including the absolutely gorgeous album opener “Sunrise,” multiple voice-overs including a disturbing police-encounter on “Trouble In Town,” and several allusions to middle-eastern culture. It’s quite ambitious and really a damn shame it also may come to be their least heard work. Check it out.

Should you also check out Bush’s 2017 release Black And White Rainbows? Sure, I guess. Why not?

You know that episode of Home Improvement when Tim’s old college buddy Stu¹⁵ pops back in to town ready to party and Tim, now a domesticated forty-ish, is more interested in a quiet night in watching The Sound Of Music with the family? Stu, still retaining his youthful exuberance, descends upon the Taylor abode eager to engage in all types of manly activities like burping, pumping iron and chugging beer. Tim disappoints him by only participating half-heartedly.

While listening to this album, I felt like Stu.

He asks “remember when we used to go to the gym and practically kill ourselves to impress Donna Gilmore? I asked “do you remember the chaos and crunch of Gen-X anthem “Everything Zen”? Then he was like “do you remember you and me and Donna driving around in our ’68 Impala, top down, her blonde hair blowin’ in the wind? I was like ” do you remember the sultry groove of “Mouth,” the tender beauty of “Glycerine” or the electro-angst of “The Chemicals Between Us?”

Bush, of course, did nothing wrong pumping out the fifteen tracks¹⁶ of serviceable mid-tempo rock on Black And White Rainbows the same way Tim did nothing wrong turning down a night of partying at Club Piranha to instead watch Julie Andrews spin in a field. In fact, there really isn’t a “bad” song in the bunch. “Mad Love,” the opener, eventually grew on me though I wouldn’t say I have mad love for it. “Toma Mi Corazón” is kind of cool. “Lost In You” and “All The Worlds Within You” are fine. A tad banal, but they’re fine. They’re just not the same…and that’s OK. If I’m ever feeling nostalgic for old Bush¹⁷, those records will always be there the same way a weathered Polaroid of a ’68 Impala will always be tucked into Stu’s wallet, just waiting to guide him down memory lane.

Besides Bush, another holdover from the glorious 90s rock scene that’s still out there doing their thing is Stone Temple Pilots. But wherein Bush’s Black And White Rainbows had me longing for the old days, STP’s Perdida has me excited for what may come. The irony is, they achieved this by abandoning much of what makes them STP. Sure, the DeLeo brothers knack for a good hook is still present, but instead of girdling those hooks with Zeppelin-esque riffs, they are delicately swathed in acoustics and lithe percussion. This gives the album a melancholic essence, but not in a particularly bleak or depressing manner. It’s more of a cozy, put on your sweats and ease into your favorite chair on a Sunday-morning kind of vibe.

The title, Perdida (loss in español), serves as the overarching theme for both the record’s lyrics about bygone loves but also for the band itself, having lost not one but two lead singers in recent years. The current front-man, Jeff Gutt¹⁸ , deftly manages the somewhat somber tunes, paying homage to the late Scott Weiland without veering into straight up mimicry.

Musically, the classic rock influences are still there, but instead of the arena rock stylings of songs like “Plush” we get the jangly, folk-rock of “She’s My Queen.” There’s no T-Rex aping glam rock like “Big Bang Baby” but we get the gorgeously swaying ballad “Miles Away” that’s more in the vein of the early 70s singer/songwriters. And when bassist Robert DeLeo handles vocal duties on “Years,” his soothing, ethereal delivery brings to mind Alan Parson’s “Time.”

To put it another way, STP is evolving. Whether Perdida represents a permanent shift away from their grungy-beginnings or it’s just a one-off remains to be seen. Either way, this record is an absolute gem and in an alternate universe where rock bands, especially “dinosaur rock” bands like STP, aren’t looked upon about as favorably as a fart in an elevator, it would in the running for any number of accolades.

As I am currently unable to think of any possible segue from that last sentence, we might as well just dive in to this next record. It’s from some guy from Minnesota who called himself Prince except for a brief period in the 90s when he called himself (unpronounceable symbol).

All jokes aside, the Purple One is well represented among the albums I own but have yet to listen to. Not counting this one, there are still an additional ten I need to hear¹⁹ . My hope is that they all are as impressive as Around The World In A Day, though I understand much of his later work pales in comparison.

What makes ATWIAD so great? Let’s start with the fact that it’s all killer, no filler. Remember, this album dropped in 1985, well before the streaming days where artists are incentivized to stuff the track lists for revenue²⁰. We get nine songs spread over a brisk forty-two minutes with no waste.

We all know “Raspberry Beret”, the best song ever released about falling in love with a unintelligent woman with a penchant for cheap, French hats while your toiling away doing nothing for a racist boss at a five and dime store. And you’ve also heard “Pop Life” which exists to admonish those whose jealousy and ennui breeds bitterness and eventually substance abuse. Thematically, it’s kind of like like the Eagle’s post reunion single “Get Over It” except with more cocaine.

It’s really some of the lesser known tunes that strengthen this release in my opinion. The 1-2 punch of the opening title track and “Paisley Park” really establish ATWIAD as Prince’s attempt to recreate the late 60s Haight-Ashbury hippie vibe during the height of Reagan’s America. He wants to be our guide to his psychedelic panacea with lyrics like-

“The little one will escort you
Two places within your mind
The former is red, white, and blue
The ladder is purple, come on and climb.”

And on “Paisley Park” when he speaks of “colorful people whose hair on one side is swept back” and their smiles that speak “of profound inner peace” you can tell he’s looking to use his, pop, soul and funk to elevate listeners to another plane of existence. Things don’t really get weird, though, until the eight-minute long album closer “Temptation.” The track basically explodes from Prince’s loins, opening with him tickling his fretboard and whispering “Sex…Temptation…Lust” before he releases an orgasmic scream over a slinking, saxy groove that slowly climbs and climbs and until it finally…you get it. Five minutes in, he slows things down to get a bit explicit over a skittering electronic beat and some dancing ivories. He is incorrigible, repeatedly asserting “You, I want you. I want you in the worst way,” until finally the guy from the Allstate Insurance commercials²¹ tells him to calm the bleep down or he’ll die. No, seriously. What a masterpiece!

And last but not least, we have Macca’s mid-to-late period highlight, Flaming Pie, which unfortunately does not have a song where anyone gets sentenced to death for wanting too much sex. What it does have, though, are fourteen reminders that, when in the zone, Paul McCartney is virtually unparalleled as a songwriter.

I added “when in the zone” there because while Sir Paul releases albums as frequently as the Detroit Lions waste first round draft picks, he is known to lay the occasional egg (see 1986’s Press To Play and the aptly-titled 1979’s Back To The Egg). This one though is just plain fun.

Teaming up with various producers including “fifth Beatle” George Martin and ELO’s band leader and multi-instrumentalist, Jeff Lynne, the proceedings are loose and unpretentious. Opener “The Song We Were Singing” provides the album’s mission statement:

“For a while, we could sit, smoke a pipe
And discuss all the vast intricacies of life
Yeah, we could jaw through the night
Talk about a range of subjects, anything you like
But we always came back to the song we were singing.”

Basically, it’s all about the song. And oh, what a batch they collected here! Single, “The World Tonight” is a nice, mid-tempo rocker that I vaguely remember hearing on 94.7 WCSX while driving in my two-toned 1987 Dodge Dakota back when the album dropped. “If You Wanna” likewise is a brisk, pulsing toe-tapper as is the title track which features a lively piano interlude and is only slightly less strange another of McCartney’s pie-themed tunes, “Wild Honey Pie²².” And on bluesy “Used To Be Bad” he pairs up with Steve Miller to form the best little bar-band this side of The News.

The validation of Flaming Pie as a classic among McCartney’s oeuvre comes from some of the more contemplative works. “Calico Skies” fits in nicely with standards “And I Love Her” and “I Will” as one of his greatest love songs. “Heaven On A Sunday” a more casual, contemporary sounding ode to affection features some exemplary guitar work and a melody you will swear you’ve heard before even though you haven’t.

Among all these treasures, though, the two that harken back to the Fab Four days are my favorites; “Somedays” and “Beautiful Night.” The former’s understated acoustic guitar and lyrics of muddled love are accentuated by tasteful orchestration that bring to mind “Eleanor Rigby.” And the “Hey-Jude”-y²³ sounding “Beautiful Night” builds slowly before culminating in a bit more uptempo coda repeating the song’s title in celebration. It’s even capped off with some post-song banter reminiscent of “I GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!” This record really makes me wonder, as it does countless others I would reckon, what might have been if all four mop-tops had survived and continued making music. While we’ll never know, at least we have Flaming Pie to give us a taste (I’m sorry).

That should just about do it for now. Ten down, only…one thousand, two hundred and forty-one to go!

1. Tidal is a music streaming service. It’s like Spotify, just not as good.
2. Sprint was a telecommunications company. It was like Verizon, just not as good.
3. A thirst not for water, but for born-again period Dylan albums.
4. Probably.
5. Or, more likely, ears.
6. Breakup records are the best (see Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Beck’s Sea Change, etc.) I’m glad at least we get some pleasure from all these artist’s pain.
7. Or the status quid, for that matter.
8. Julia Gulia. That’s funny.
9. The last record released was Teyana Taylor’s K.T.S.E.
10. Three listens through Nasir roughly equals the length of Catharsis.
11. Robb may have invented a new genre.
12. Perhaps they might have this year but corona.
13. It’s not really an aisle, per se. More like a couple of shelves.
14. The only unmasked people I encountered were Target employees. SMH.
15. Played by a wonderfully mustachioed Shooter McGavin.
16. Seventeen! on the deluxe version.
17. That sounds wrong.
18. Michigan’s own!
19. And another twenty or so I still don’t own. Dude was prolific!
20. Seriously. Have you seen Chris Brown’s Heartbreak On A Full Moon? Forty-five tracks!!! They can’t all be gold.
21. It’s not really Dennis Haysbert but it’s more fun to pretend it is.
22. The track off of The White Album features lyrics such as “Honey pie,” “honey pie,” and “I love you, honey pie.”
23. Not “Hey Judy.”

Art design: Erik Belcarz. Credits: Headphones, Erik Belcarz. Desert Road, sourced at http://ccsearch-dev.creativecommons.org/photos/290bc720-9c1c-485c-bcf9-1e69ddc852d1, oatsy40.