Methods of Listening

Dear music-listening friends, which I hope is everyone?

My questions are mostly for a subset of you I can’t easily categorize but who appear to be familiar with every song from every era of recorded music, and who appear to continue to listen to many of these throughout their lives.

I have some desire to be part of this wide-listening lifestyle, but here is my problem: I’m in the subset of people who lands on a record I like, maybe two or three in the course of a few months, and listen almost exclusively to those records until they are replaced by the next one in the cycle.

I don’t advocate for this method. Because what invariably happens is that a few cycles later, I can no longer listen to that record without being propelled back in time to the period when I was exclusively listening to that particular record, and to an extent, it really doesn’t matter if it was a good time or not a good time.

I think, I think, it probably comes down to just the reminder of the passage of time.

I am sixty-four years old.

I need no reminders about the passage of time. It often feels like all I think about is time. This isn’t new, I was this way when I was much younger too, but it carries more weight now that I have less of it ahead than behind.

I have a goal, a practice, of trying to stay in the present. I am most certainly not great at it. Very random memories arrive unbidden and for no apparent reason – other times the reason is apparent – something reminds you of something, like let’s say a song or a record. But random memories usually pass as quickly as any other random thought, whereas a record is a deep dive into the specific time-related memories associated with it, and then I’m off revisiting feelings I’m not sure I want to refeel.

I also have a goal of neither regretting the past nor wishing to shut the door on it. I don’t regret too many things, thankfully, and I write about the past often, and sometimes I don’t enjoy refeeling those things either, but I’m compelled to do it; it’s what I do, and it might, it might, add up to some thing of some value to some one some where some day. Whereas going into a record takes me out of the present in a way that, well, this is maybe the part I can’t pinpoint. In a way that makes me not want to.

Sometimes the associations that come up are more obvious, so rather than catalog my often-considered-uncool record-listening history (truly though, I long ago stopped caring what anyone thinks about Billy Joel once meant to me), I’ll give the clearest example: when your mom is an opera singer, the soundtrack is all-live-opera-all-the-time-in-the-next-room, and it’s not even that I didn’t like opera, I sang it myself! (NYCO, children’s chorus and elsewhere, I’ll try to find some pix.) I just cannot listen to it, worse if it’s her (and she was more talented when she was performing with a single lung than a shit ton of opera singers with two). Like 99.9 percent of childhoods, mine was fraught with complicated feelings and family situations and opera is like a rocket into my deepest sadnesses. I tend to think opera took her away from me, though it could be argued that that part of her life offered me as much as I felt it subtracted. Either way, I don’t listen to opera now if I can help it, but it's not a dissimilar idea. It all takes me out of now.

So I guess what I’m asking, music-from-the-past-listening friends, is how you navigate this. Is it even a thing? Is it a thing you seek? Not a thing at all?

I am listening.

baby me is less than thrilled about what lay ahead

I am the third angel from the left here on the front page of the Aspen Times, laugh emoji

mom

serious young me again, mid-performance of something

my best guess here, since I’m nine and this looks like a Musetta costume - I have already changed out of my green velvet costume (cannot find those pics rn but there are some) - this is just after a NYCO performance, and the look on my face - well let’s leave it at this: maybe I’ll do a close read on that another time.