In Love Like...

I was thinking this morning about why it is that some cds don't hit you until months, years, decades after you first acquire them. This is a topic I've discussed many times with my brother Thomas, (who writes about music on his blogs--casket, shroud, and grave and per diem) because we're always giving each other music, and only months later finding ourselves really loving it.

This has been on my mind recently because I put on an old cd by the Avett Brothers in my car, the other day, and ended up falling in love with at least 3 songs that I had never noticed before. I got the cd about 3 years ago, when I was a DJ at KRCL. In those days, with KRCL's huge library of music, I was always scrounging up albums, copying them, finding one song I liked to play on the show, and then moving on to the next cd. That's one problem with DJing--I have a compulsion to keep finding new artists, new songs, new sounds. That means that I often move through cds quickly, mining songs and not paying attention to the cd as a whole. The Avett Brothers' cd, "A Carolina Jubilee," provided me with a song that I loved, and which I played on the show. I think once I heard this one song, I stopped listening to the record:

This week, with the cd in my car on my commute to work, I've discovered 3 new songs that I cannot believe I didn't fall immediately in love with before.

and

Right now these songs seem so obviously FANTASTIC, that I can't believe I didn't like them when I heard the album for the very first time. But no, except for "Love Like the Movies," I thought I didn't like this album. Why is that? I have no clear explanation except for this one possibility: at the time, I was listening to a lot of music by the Magnetic Fields that Thomas had passed on to me. Not surprisingly, "Love Like the Movies" is the most Magnetic Fields-y song on "A Carolina Jubilee." Perhaps music sounds different depending on what other music you've been listening to at the time. Kind of like with food and wines. Certain flavors can overwhelm others, making them taste weak and simplistic, but if you try that flavor alone, or in combination with similar ingredients, it will suddenly taste amazing.

Attn: Avett Brothers

You taste amazing!