good to go

You know those times when you are listening to a record and the music just grabs you and makes you a part of it? I am having one of those moments. I bought a copy of the The Hot Rock by the no longer Sleater-Kinney for a buck over the weekend and haven't taken it out of the player since. It makes the cats hyper, it makes me dance and bob my head up and down (the dog seems unaffected by it although she gets excited when I dance). I have this record on cassette and I haven't listened to it in years. Seven or eight years ago my friend Kattie and I took it on a trip we made driving across the country to my friends Eric and Heather's wedding in the Maine woods. When you drive across country you tend to bring a lot of music and think "Oh, this will be plenty" and you are wrong. The cds we took on that trip will forever be burned in my memory because we played them over and over and over. This was one of them. As was Elliott Smith (the Kill Rock Stars one with Southern Belle on it as well as XO), Mazzy Star, Citizen Fish, Radiohead, Grant Lee Buffalo, Lois (Bet the Sky) and others. There are many moments of that trip where I can't tell you what day it was, what state we were in or how fast we were going but I remember the moment of listening to each song on the disc. By the end of the trip we both knew the lyrics to nearly every song on every cd. We sang along more than we talked to each other (no matter how close you are as friends, driving day in and day out across the country with no money for a hotel room it gets very difficult not to be sick to death of the other person). We created routines. Elliott Smith was played often throughout the day and was mandatory at night when we were tired and one of us would sleep while the other drove because he was so intoxicating and distracted you from the long stretch of highway.

I get into routines with my music. I have a few cds stacked on top of my stereo and tend to just go back and forth between a few until I clean house, file them all away and then slowly develop a new stack. Picking up random discs I find at thrift stores is a good way of remembering old friends, road trips I've taken and memories that have taken a back seat to current events.