Magic moments
Something straight-up magical happened today. I took a nap afterward, and when I woke up, I was like, did that really happen, or was that a dream? BUT IT REALLY HAPPENED.
Some of you (if you were big music fans like me) are old enough to remember how it was in the old days, how maybe the record you most wanted was rare and hard to find and was never in stock. My first favorite song by my first favorite band wasn't even that obscure, but I couldn't find it for two whole years. When I pulled it out of the bin, in a kind of basement, corner record shop in a distant mall I almost never got to go to, I couldn't believe I was actually holding it in my hands, and that feeling of "Oh my God, I can actually listen to this song any time I want from this day forward," that wonder and gratitude, sometimes strikes me when I hear it to this day. I'd only ever heard it before--rarely, after its brief heyday--on the radio. Sometimes the song itself seemed too good to be real. (It's a really good song! And is, perhaps not coincidentally, about magic.)
But the internet changed all that. Nowadays, if there's a song I want to hear--no matter how obscure or bizarre (such as this one)--all I've got to do is go to YouTube or iTunes or Amazon and maybe drop a dollar ... which is great, instant access ... but we lost something in having that. That sense of magic couldn't happen in this day and age ... or so I thought.
The band I've been obsessing over for quite a while now--the one that has me up late at night watching videos and paging through pages of Google images like some of us may have on occasion been known to do with SPN and our boys and con vids--broke up a while ago. Recently I learned that they completed six songs of another album before breaking up. Today I thought I ought to have a look and see if they'd released those songs somewhere so I could hear them (despite coming across an interview with the lead singer in which he said you could hear in the music that all the passion was gone), because in spite of what he said, I figured there might be some goodness in there, and I'm kind of a completist.
I didn't find those. They never released them. They only released four albums total, the latter two of which are each amazingly awesome and amazingly different. The second-to-last betrays a certain immaturity as songwriters, but it still has some really incredible music on it, and the last--fugeddaboudit. I had indeed come across mention a couple of months ago that they actually recorded that last album multiple times before they finally made the recording they were happy with, and I didn't think more about this ... until today, when I discovered that they DID in fact release (some of? all of?) those recordings--but in limited release, via their website, long ago.
Scarcely daring to hope, I went to Amazon ... only to find they're available via MP3 ... and that they number ten full songs: a full album's worth, released as five two-song mini-albums. These songs must be a well-kept secret (in a bandom with no secrets), because while their other albums have hundreds upon hundreds of Amazon reviews, each of these recordings barely has twenty, and they don't ever seem to be mentioned when people are talking about their records.
If I could have wished for an album by this band to manifest out of thin air and suddenly appear in my shuffle, it would have been a full record recorded between their last two albums, the missing link that delineates the process of maturing from the one to the other (after which they got so good, there was nowhere further for the band to go, or so I think). Who knew, that even in this day and age, that magical feeling of finding the obscure record in the bin could be mine once more?
Okay, after writing this with the burned CD beside me on my desk, I think my feet are starting to touch the earth again, just a little.
It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.
Some of you (if you were big music fans like me) are old enough to remember how it was in the old days, how maybe the record you most wanted was rare and hard to find and was never in stock. My first favorite song by my first favorite band wasn't even that obscure, but I couldn't find it for two whole years. When I pulled it out of the bin, in a kind of basement, corner record shop in a distant mall I almost never got to go to, I couldn't believe I was actually holding it in my hands, and that feeling of "Oh my God, I can actually listen to this song any time I want from this day forward," that wonder and gratitude, sometimes strikes me when I hear it to this day. I'd only ever heard it before--rarely, after its brief heyday--on the radio. Sometimes the song itself seemed too good to be real. (It's a really good song! And is, perhaps not coincidentally, about magic.)
But the internet changed all that. Nowadays, if there's a song I want to hear--no matter how obscure or bizarre (such as this one)--all I've got to do is go to YouTube or iTunes or Amazon and maybe drop a dollar ... which is great, instant access ... but we lost something in having that. That sense of magic couldn't happen in this day and age ... or so I thought.
The band I've been obsessing over for quite a while now--the one that has me up late at night watching videos and paging through pages of Google images like some of us may have on occasion been known to do with SPN and our boys and con vids--broke up a while ago. Recently I learned that they completed six songs of another album before breaking up. Today I thought I ought to have a look and see if they'd released those songs somewhere so I could hear them (despite coming across an interview with the lead singer in which he said you could hear in the music that all the passion was gone), because in spite of what he said, I figured there might be some goodness in there, and I'm kind of a completist.
I didn't find those. They never released them. They only released four albums total, the latter two of which are each amazingly awesome and amazingly different. The second-to-last betrays a certain immaturity as songwriters, but it still has some really incredible music on it, and the last--fugeddaboudit. I had indeed come across mention a couple of months ago that they actually recorded that last album multiple times before they finally made the recording they were happy with, and I didn't think more about this ... until today, when I discovered that they DID in fact release (some of? all of?) those recordings--but in limited release, via their website, long ago.
Scarcely daring to hope, I went to Amazon ... only to find they're available via MP3 ... and that they number ten full songs: a full album's worth, released as five two-song mini-albums. These songs must be a well-kept secret (in a bandom with no secrets), because while their other albums have hundreds upon hundreds of Amazon reviews, each of these recordings barely has twenty, and they don't ever seem to be mentioned when people are talking about their records.
If I could have wished for an album by this band to manifest out of thin air and suddenly appear in my shuffle, it would have been a full record recorded between their last two albums, the missing link that delineates the process of maturing from the one to the other (after which they got so good, there was nowhere further for the band to go, or so I think). Who knew, that even in this day and age, that magical feeling of finding the obscure record in the bin could be mine once more?
Okay, after writing this with the burned CD beside me on my desk, I think my feet are starting to touch the earth again, just a little.
Click to viewIt's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.