Record as Book
Giving the Album Your Undivided Attention
My wife made a joke one morning that now sticks as a representation of how often I have earbuds in. She asked me some question and I tapped the side of my right earbud to pause the music, and said the 30th "What?" She responded, "what? What, Cold Eagle?" with her finger to her ear like a three-letter agent would do. Cold Eagle became my call sign for subsequent roasts about how often I just walk around the house pausing music going "what, what."
I am overwhelmed by the amount of music that exists and almost addicted to it in a way that I think I should be constantly listening so I miss as little of it as possible before I die. So what that means is I usually have earbuds jammed in my ears multi-tasking away, but at the end of things not really giving full attention to the thing I care so much about, I'm just sort of consuming it for the sake of consumption.
Someone, a new friend, a cool acquaintance, whatever the qualifier is, recently explained to me that he is starting to treat listening to music as an end of the day gift rather than a persistent background. We had lunch together recently and I think both of us shared that given more attention, listening to an album can really be like reading a book. Music is a form of art that easily drops into the background to frame a mood, but it can also be centered to our attention like a gallery painting. Exclude audiobooks for a second--there's no way to read and multi-task. You either read or don't.
Albums usually have narrative drive to them. Rising and falling action. Emotional dynamics. These intricacies are lost when music takes the role of vibe setter rather than page turner. After this cool acquaintance explained he was being more deliberately about how he listened, I resolved to be a little more focused with my own listening. Part of the issue is that music is so dominated by playlists now that all the narrative intent to producing an album is lost in the lack of context a single song has in that playlist.
After I'm done writing, I'm going to put a record on and just listen to it. No cooking food. No flipping through tik tok cringe videos. Just reading the album.
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