When the Right Music Finds You at the Right Time
My 25-year journey with an album I just heard for the first time
We are the beneficiaries of a secular miracle. Right now, beneath our fingertips, we have access to more music than we could ever possibly listen to. And like most miracles, we take it entirely for granted. Of course we can listen to any music we like, anytime we like, at little or no cost. Was it not always thus?
Amid all this abundance, you’d think music would be devalued, a currency wiped out by its omnipresence. But music can surprise us with the ways in which something for everyone can also prove itself to be for us alone, the ways in which a mass medium can still be intensely personal. Case in point: my 25-year journey with an album I heard for the first time last month.
Walking on down the road / Looking for a friendly handout /Somebody ease my soul.
I know I’m dating myself when I say that I spent much of 1995 in Tower Records, a hulking enclosure along Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles, on a street clogged with UCLA undergraduates. Inside, the store felt like a portal to another world. On the bottom floor were CDs from the latest MTV heartthrobs, the Beatles reissues, the T-shirts and pins; on the mezzanine, jazz and international music; on the upper floor, endless rows…
