December is riding in on fluffy, lazy snowflakes. I'm lying on a couch with my best friend's baby asleep in my arms. I'm gazing out the attic window at treetops and slow-motion winter weather. The music up here comes from my old iMac and it's like a time capsule no matter how often I play it. Nothing has been added to it in four years, maybe five. And the thing wasn't even plugged in for at least two of the intervening years. It doesn't have a built-in CD burner, either--every song in there might as well be preserved in amber, accessible only from this dinosaur of a machine (the first color-screen computer I ever had!).This is also the first computer I used for music. I bought it in 2000 or 2001 and all the songs I put into it are mine, you know? I was so single during the time I used this thing, at least until the last year of its waning days, anyway. P is a music junkie--he owns thousands of albums and has broadened my musical taste more than I ever thought possible. He is the dj in our house and I wouldn't have it any other way (except sometimes, like when he's in a Skeletonwitch mood or on a Pavement binge, or a Fugazi bender--I can take some of that stuff but he knows it's best to play it when I'm not around). So the music up here represents the last music that was purely mine. (I'm trying to write this in a way that doesn't make it seem like my delicate sensibilities have careened helplessly into the gaping maw of my husband's voracious musical appetite, but it isn't working. So can you just take my word that P taking over at house dj a good thing? It means we do not listen to a finite number of relentlessly sorrowful songs on a continuous loop--New Me finds Old Me's taste to be quaint and pretty, and it does bring back the memories, but you absolutely cannot dance to it.)
That said, I love being the dj of my sewing room (the attic). Lots of the playlists I listen to were composed in the early days of 2001 or 2002, when I lived in another attic--that of an old house that was converted to apartments. It was mere blocks from the hippest part of downtown Columbus; I was single and skinny and waiting tables for a living. I had painted the walls of my tiny garret various shades of purple and turned it into a kind of bohemian-looking hovel. My mattress was on the floor (on top of box springs, but still). I dyed cheap curtains and hung them on a makeshift bamboo rod (suspended from the slanting ceiling by raffia! Ah, to be young once more...) which separated the "bedroom" from the spot where I kept the computer and a bookshelf and some pillows to sit on.
I listened to Dar Williams and Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams up there. I listened to Gomez, Willie Nelson, Tom T. Hall, Van Morrison, "Greetings from Asbury Park," Stevie Wonder. I listened to "The Captain" by KC Chambers. I listened to songs, not albums--that's one of the main differences between me and P, actually. I know it's not a purist's way to do things, but the sewing room catalog is riddled with single tracks from many artists and bands. I had only recently discovered iTunes and was enamored of the way you could just get a song you heard at out one night or on the radio.
Bless the hearts of my friends back then, people I worked with at the restaurant who didn't owe me anything--they would come up to my little attic and sit at my computer (at my drunken bidding) and agree that it was very cool to just get any song you wanted, and make playlists with me and give me ideas for songs to buy. The sheer dorkiness of that practice is stunning me this morning as I remember it for the first time in a while, but it's also something sort of sweet and innocent from a time I don't often associate with those qualities.
I remember that I listened to music alphabetically. I didn't really utilize the playlist option that much, and one night I was listening to the Rolling Stones to impress a guy and when it came to the end of that, a Rod Stewart song came on. Oh, the horror! In my defense, I acquired the Rod Stewart in a Rushmore-induced fit--it was "Ooh La La." And now that I'm thinking about it, it does not defend me at all--it only reveals how thoroughly uncool I really am. See, a quick Google search reveals that the song at the end of Rushmore is not performed by Rod Stewart. Duh, if you're cool. If you're me, you download the Rod Stewart version and think you're cool until something like this happens and you remember that you are actually the kind of dork who invites people to after hours and then makes them sit in front of your computer with you. I still do that. I'm kind of doing it right now, aren't I?
Some things never change.
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