No Soundtracks Now

Around the turn of the century my access to music changed.

Prior to that time, I bought CDs. I still dubbed songs from CD to cassettes not because that was a preferred medium for music, but because it was the only way I could compile songs I liked from different albums in whatever order and mix of artists I liked. Those mixes tended to be an amalgamation of one or two new songs I liked clustered with a bundle of old ones, because barring a birthday or Christmas I rarely got my hands on more than one new album every few months.

When I left for college, though, my parents gifted me my first computer of my own, complete with a fifteen gigabyte hard drive and CD burner that henceforth rendered cassettes obsolete for my personal music consumption. Better yet, at college I had access to far faster Internet than the dial-up we used at home, and there was a full network of music files being shared (illegally) across campus, and so I quickly amassed the a music library several times larger than what I’d had before.

Each year, I made a soundtrack.

Beholden to the CD format, because if I wasn’t at my computer, I listened to music on the CD player in my car or on my Discman, I started creating one CD each December to document my biggest memories with songs that would remind me of those times, grouped together with songs I just happened to like over the preceding year.

The practice was more than a little silly, particularly for the forced connections I often as not made between music and moments. For every totally organic connection to a concert I took a date to, or a song I learned at my summer camp job, there were other cases when I consciously sought out a song to apply to a memory. For all of the contrivance inherent in the exercise, though, I found value in this annual act of concentrated reflection, and the sharper focus it took when I began blogging each about it each year to share the soundtrack.

Times change.

Around the time I left Maryland for Oregon, the process started feeling all the more forced. I kept it up less out of genuine desire to make the soundtrack for my own pleasure and nostalgia than a sense of obligation to maintain the continuity of the tradition and because I had gone public with it on the blog. The end of 2016, in particular, revealed to me how little new music I was consuming, and while that carried the benefit of seeking out more music via song-of-the-day podcasts and tracking down new releases from old favorite artists, the process of soundtrack making nonetheless didn’t get much more organic.

My first years with my son taught me a lot. First and foremost among them may be to prioritize and to say no.

I still write and I still maintain a number of projects, but I have learned to taper and make some tough decisions about things to leave behind. I recorded the final episode of my monthly podcast, my weekly wrestling column for 411mania.com came to a close shortly after. For The A Cappella Blog, I tapped into material I wrote months, if not years back to plan ahead and stockpile content, before wrapping up the site twelve years in.

I've carried on with this blog because, of all the side projects I do, it’s the one that I have the most autonomy around and feel the most pleasure working on. But I am letting go of parts of it that feel obligatory over intrinsically rewarding.

That’s a long way of getting at that I won’t be making, nor blogging about a soundtrack this year. It seems counterintuitive, in a sense, because in spite of the pandemic that haunted the globe, it was largely a good year on a personal level, with more time centered around our family, not to mention some new accomplishments in writing and a good year of teaching. But all that absence of sleep that comes with parenthood and a busy work life cuts off time for music and in-the- moment reflection.

This isn’t necessarily the end of the soundtrack concept. Part of what I love about this blog is the degree of ownership I have over it, and degree of arbitrary control I have in coming back around to things when I feel like it. For now, though, apologies to the handful of you who’ve made it clear you look forward to this annual post. Thanks, as always for reading, and my best to you and yours for a happy new year.