I’ve never been a musician (aside from a handful of unfortunate years struggling to play the flute in the school concert band), but music has always been important to me. My earliest memories of music are of playing 45’s of The Beatles and Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas” on a plastic Fisher-Price record player. My dad’s record collection is extensive: hundreds of albums meticulously taken care of and stored, incongruously, in a bathroom closet. Sometimes he would have me pick one to play, and I’d spend a long time standing in front of the closet, pulling out albums to look at the cover art, stopping once I got to one I liked.
One example: King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, the cover art of which my mom once painted onto a sweatshirt that has since disappeared. The artwork was painted by Barry Godber, a computer programmer and friend of King Crimson co-founder Peter Sinfield. In the Court was Godber’s only album cover, and according to band member Robert Fripp, the only painting he ever made; he died at 24 from a heart attack, just four months after the album was released. Fripp, in a 1995 interview, says that “The face on the outside is the Schizoid Man, and on the inside it's the Crimson King. If you cover the smiling face, the eyes reveal an incredible sadness. What can one add? It reflects the music.”
Over the years, I’ve drifted away from the physical part of music. Streaming playlists have replaced CDs and records. Cabinet speakers have been swapped for a tiny Bluetooth speaker which I always forget to charge. Spotify algorithms dictate much of what I listen to, making the consumption of music less mindful. Less physical. As is the case for many things these days, I’ve felt a loss of connection to music.
When I was younger—before cell phones, when the internet existed but didn’t overshadow our lives—playing music was an activity itself. I would thumb through a stack of CDs, take the disc out of the plastic jewel case with a satisfying pop, then page through the album booklet as the first notes played. In my twenties, living in a small apartment in Pittsburgh, I started my own vinyl collection. I’d spend afternoons lost in Jerry’s Records in Squirrel Hill, home to half a million albums and owned, at the time, by Jerry himself. I fell more deeply in love with music and the physicality of it: running my fingers across the album spines. Smelling the vinyl as I took it out of the thin paper sleeve. Setting the stylus on the turntable and cleaning the dust from the record as it spins. That first crackle as the needle is lowered to the groove.
In looking at my relationship to music in recent years, I realize that the time and attention I used to give it has waned; it’s turned into something I mindlessly consume in brief spaces within a flurry of other activities. Real connection requires real attention, and I have not been mindful with my attention towards a lot of the things I love these days. I’ve missed going to a record store and spending hours looking through the used CD’s, jumping with excitement when I find something I’d been looking for. And I miss listening to an album the whole way through, flipping through the booklet of artwork and song lyrics.
Album cover for XTC’s Apple Venus Volume I
This is how I’ve come to find myself sitting on the floor of my living room every night in front of the space where my TV used to sit—a space now occupied by my turntable (which I’ve had in storage for the last six years), an old CD player, a couple of thrift store speakers, and a receiver that I bought from a man on Marketplace whose living room wall featured a calendar full of tanned, oily, bikini-clad women. Gradually, I’ve been building my CD collection again. Fortunately, Lincoln has a surprisingly good roster of record stores selling vinyl as well as used CD’s, and I’ve spent hours in them now, looking through the spines of jewel cases for familiar titles. I’ve found old favorites that I haven’t listened to in years, like XTC’s Apple Venus Volume I, a weird and gorgeous album that isn’t available on Spotify. The album is bookended by two of my favorite moments in music. The first is the intro to “River of Orchids,” which opens with a growing cascade of dripping sounds and plucked orchestra strings which are eventually joined by horns before the lyrics finally enter. The second comes at the end of “The Last Balloon,” when Andy Partridge holds a long vocal note that morphs seamlessly into a flugelhorn before finishing the song out as a horn solo. I forgot how good music could sound when it’s not being played out of a pair of cheap and easily broken earbuds, or out of the aforementioned mediocre Bluetooth speaker.
I titled this “Reading Notes,” and I’m getting to that. Because as I’ve started collecting CDs and looking through my vinyl again, I’m also rediscovering the care that is put into the packaging of these albums. How, often, CD booklets and vinyl sleeves represent a collision between visual art, music, lyrics, poetry, and ephemera. Take, for example, the CD booklet for Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele, which features a photo of Amos cradling a four-day-old pig that she appears to be nursing—a photo so controversial that UK versions of the album’s songbook were released without it. Or look at Pearl Jam’s packaging for their 1996 album No Code, which folds out to reveal a compartment containing individual Polaroid-style photos with handwritten song lyrics scrawled on the back. Or their 1994 album, Vitalogy, which includes a booklet filled with different ephemera and artwork—diagrams, pages of glossaries and indexes from old books, collages. One page, which includes the lyrics for “Whipping,” features a petition letter addressed to President Clinton expressing outrage over the murder of Dr. David Gunn, a physician who was shot and killed in 1993 for providing abortions in Pensacola, Florida.
Tori Amos, Boys for Pele
Pearl Jam, No Code
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy
Songbooks sometimes resemble chapbooks or zines, containing stories or history about the music, artists, or artwork. One example: a 2006 reissue of Karen Dalton’s 1971 album In My Own Time, which includes reflections and mini-essays about Dalton by musicians Nick Cave, Lenny Kaye, and Devendra Banhart. Lenny Kaye, quoting Lacy J. Dalton (who Kaye says “took her last name from Dalton, to honor the unspoken student-teacher bond the two developed), writes:
What she was, in the end, was a harbinger of our despair, a “canary in a coal mine,” as Lacy puts it, one of those who see “the sorrow of what man does to man and the planet, the acute awfulness which is sometimes too much for sensitive souls. Karen loved the earth, as a Native American, a woman, a queen, a pagan mother goddess rooted in this planet, and she was so desolate about what we were doing to it.”
Karen's response was not to shout. Lacy remembers her hands as being soft, weathered, as expressive as her voice. “Why do you think you have to sing so loud?” Karen once asked her. “If you want to be heard, you have to sing softer.”
Listen close.
I’ll end here with a short and certainly non-exhaustive list of albums that, in addition to the ones mentioned here, I think are worthy of attention, of sitting still and listening the whole way through. They are in no particular order. Some of them I think of as “perfect” albums, but only in the sense that the most perfect things in this world are perfect for their having some sort of beautiful imperfection. Happy listening:
Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel is Wiser…
Noname - Telefone
Harumi - Harumi
Beverly Glenn-Copeland - Keyboard Fantasies
Patti Smith - Horses
Santana - Santana
Christine McVie - The Legendary Christine McVie Perfect Album
Andrew Bird - Echolocations: Canyon
Feist - Metals
A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders
Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians
Tracy Chapman - Tracy Chapman
Sharon Van Etten - Are We There
PJ Harvey - To Bring You My Love
Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights
Aimee Mann - Mental Illness
Lhasa De Sela - Lhasa