Burns His CDs

Around the turn of each year, there’s a short playlist I like to revisit of songs explicitly about New Year’s or that I, for whatever combination of factors associate with that time. The first track is Tori Amos’s “Pretty Good Year.”

It’s a melancholy, reflective song which all signs indicate is more about a birthday than a new calendar year. Just the same, the mixture of nostalgia and inveterate sadness always draws me in, and there’s one line in particular that I’ve grown enamored with over time:

And Greg he writes letters
and burns his CDs

I don’t know for sure when I first encountered “Pretty Good Year” but I best remember listening to it during that decade-or-so period when burning music to CDs was king—before portable, digital music became prevalent, or at least before it reached my world. Thus, the line about Greg burning CDs, particularly in juxtaposition to writing letters, read as a creative act to me, and one I identified with as someone who was so regularly--borderline compulsively--both writing and making mix CDs.

The trouble with this reading is that “Pretty Good Year” came out on the Under The Pink album, released in 1994, and so was recorded (and of course written) well before that. While there may have been some early adopters and innovators already burning CDs via cutting edge technology, it was far from common practice or colloquialism at that point. So, we’re left to understand that Greg was actually throwing his CDs into a fire. Oddly, both acts, particularly set against Amos’s melody of choice and larger lyrical narrative, could be read as comparable expressions of sadness--my original reading more of a catharsis, the literal meaning more destructive--but I always found it a captivating little oddity that a lyric’s meaning could change like that based on the evolution of language and technological process.

Listening to this song again in 2016, I was struck by the lyric again, because of a different epiphany. For just as the idea of burning a blank CD had become more accessible than the idea of throwing a CD into a fire years after Amos recorded the song, in the years to follow, burning CDs had become an antiquated process, not altogether unlike recording from the radio to an audio cassette like I had as a child, when I first started to love music and first felt a drive to own it in some material way so I could listen to it at will rather than waiting for it to come on the radio again.

No, by 2016, the idea of throwing a CD in--a relic of a time past, perhaps only valuable for nostalgia, not function--into a fire, seemed more accessible than loading a blank CD-R into the drive and going through the motions of applying music to it.

And so, this song, this lyric, circles upon itself and continues to demark the ruthless passage of time for those of us old enough to have bought CDs that we might burn, and to have burned CDs in our computer, and have lived to see an era when people don’t use hard copy CDs all that much anymore (note, for those readers older than me, I of course recognize that I’m not all that ancient, but as you might recall, by the time you get into your mid-thirties, you start to feel old relative to so many pieces of the world around you).

Better yet for the song--and why I continue to listen to it year after year--it’s an expression of a specific kind of sorrow that some of us feel on birthdays, at holidays, at the turn of the year. That sense of forcing ourselves to smile, forcing ourselves to say it’s been a good year and clinging to those moments when life really was good, in the face of a bleak winter, with knowledge--that comes with passing years-- that some things will never be the same.