Category: music

Yesterday I began the daunting task of reorganizing and renovating my office. I don’t actually do any work in my office because the space stresses me out. It may look neatly organized to the casual observer but to me it is one big pile of clutter. The desktop computer is more like a doorstop and the bookshelves are overflowing.

One of the first things I decided to do was to pack up our extensive CD collection into a storage tub and stick it in the attic. Mike and I both love music a ton and over the years have amassed hundreds of CDs, but now of course everything is digital. I have multiple iPods and an iPhone and I never use my CD player anymore.

So I sat down on the floor with a storage tub and started going through each and every CD we owned to make sure the disc was in the proper case and set some aside for a future garage sale.

It was a really interesting experience, going through all those CDs, much like looking at an old photo album. Music has played a huge role in my life and obviously in Mike’s life too. I remember well buying my first few CDs in middle school, often very obscure “modern rock” stuff like Voice of the Beehive, They Might Be Giants and The Las. I still have the Red Hot Chili Peppers CD “Blood Sugar Sex Magic” with the parental advisory mark blacked out in hopes my parents wouldn’t find it. They did and confiscated it for awhile. It’s still one of the best albums of the 90’s.

There’s a big bunch of chick music CDs that I brought to the marriage, like a ton of Tori Amos and Alanis Morrisette, and there’s an equal amount of classic rock from Mike’s side. What was always interesting to me were the duplicates…albums we both bought independently before we met that showed overlapping taste. Those were Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam, Live and the Foo Fighters mostly.

What I didn’t remember was the phase of angry, angsty hard rock Mike must have gone through because there are a LOT of albums I can’t stand by bands like Limp Biskit, Tool and Korn. Yuck.

My country music phase is evident and did not last at all. I have zero interest in keeping all the Faith Hill and Tim McGraw albums I bought. Alternative music is timeless to me, country music is most definitely not.

And of course there is our extensive jazz collection which began when the two of us enrolled in a class on The History of Jazz for our art elective in college together. That was a great class and we really enjoyed listening to albums and even attending a few concerts by guys like Thelonius Monk and Wynton Marsalis. Miles Davis’ album Kind Of Blue is pure masterpiece, plain and simple.

The afternoon walk down memory lane was a great one, a good opportunity to remember the people we were before we were married for 14 years. I think it’s great for a married couple to think about what drew you together and what your courtship was like.

It’s too easy to forget.