I have been listening to my iPod this morning while I make soup. What better way to get through 8600+ songs than by turning on "shuffle" and seeing what comes up?
Listening randomly can be a weird exercise in nostalgia, especially when the bulk of your music collection is stuff you've had for many many years.
So I smiled through Joe Jackson, which reminded me of my old boyfriend Tom, and I laughed at Hunter Thompson reading a William Burroughs poem about Jack Kerouac (how did that get on there?) which made me think of a class in modern English lit I took at Berkeley, and I sang along to The Band doing I Shall Be Released, which made me think of UCSC days. So I was floating around in a musical time that had me in college, and I was enjoying being there, especially being there in a musical way, because I've just been reading a lot about the musical influences of my UCSC friends on Facebook.
Click. Andrea Bocelli singing that song about "It's Time to Say Goodbye." Suddenly I am in a car in Seattle and my ex-boyfriend Terry is asking me to marry him, and I am saying no. It was a desperation move on his part, really, since I had broken up with him earlier in the summer and spent a few tormented months trying to figure out if that had been the right thing to do. On that last night, he gave me the Andrea Bocelli CD Romanza, and we were listening to it in the car as I drove him home from wherever we'd been out re-hashing and crying about our relationship that I had ended. Asking me to marry him while a song played that is about saying goodbye was probably not the best move, but it is in Italian, so I am sure we were not aware of the actual words at the time. In any case, hearing the song this morning didn't make me nostalgic for any of that scene. What it did was set me thinking about turning down a marriage proposal and clearing my life for the eventual arrival of the person whose proposal was right for me. As I thought about that in musical terms, I thought to myself: What I wanted was not Andrea Bocelli. It was someone who would sing Lou Reed's "I Love You Suzanne" (which Evan did at our wedding).
Click. The schmaltzy Italian love song ends and I hear a familiar voice singing "Love makes you ten foot tall." Lou Reed. There is no better way to listen to music than the iPod shuffle.
