Zoom Out

For a long time, I have tried to stay away from writing about music. I love music, I make a lot of it, and I would like to think I have some handle on how it works. Its power lies in the emotional connections it creates—and that power can be diminished by any attempt to put pen to paper and talk about it in a meaningful way. It gets diluted in a slippery slope of harsh reviews, personal tastes, and comparison of artists. And yet, here I am, about to introduce you to my column on albums, leaving you feeling confused about my change of heart.

The fact is, music is changing. I have been consuming music ever since I bought my first CD at age six (Yes, it was a Baha Men CD. Yes, I am embarrassed. No, I do not still own it). I went through all of the phases of developing an appreciation for music: rummaging through old boxes of my dad’s classic rock vinyl, redeeming the iTunes gift cards that invariably came every Christmas and birthday, examining the first generation of mp3 players, mourning the loss of LimeWire, making the trip to Urban to buy a brand-new, old-fashioned record player for my dorm.  I have conformed to many trends in music (as I write this, I am listening to my “Sundays” playlist on Spotify), and yet I have gone defiantly against the grain in other ways—my dad’s vinyls from the ’70s made the trek to Harvard with me.

As a musician and a lover of music, what is scary is the prospect of music changing to a point I can no longer recognize. While I do not want to grow up to be the parent who sneers at his own kids for listening to “that crap they put on the radio now,” (okay, the reference to radio alone will probably make it even worse), nor the grandparent who goes to Walmart asking if they “sell Youtubes there,” I want to hold onto the good things that have come out of the history of music and how we listen to it. For me, that means that as trends towards digitalization, singles, and personalized playlists become the norm, the album as an art form should not just be another fad or retro relic.

Albums are unique in that they serve not only as a mode of compilation of several smaller parts but also as a finished product with a unified aesthetic, greater than the sum of its parts. In this tension, there is a distinctive type of experience—splurging to purchase an entire digital download or vinyl copy of lesser-known songs, committing to listening to 40 or 50 minutes of music by one artist in the order that the artist intended, reading through the liner notes. Only when you have this experience do you start to appreciate the unique beauty that accompanies it—bringing together songs of different tempos, keys, and moods, understanding the nuances of an artist or band, or simply uncovering the larger trends in emotion and intention that inevitably bleed into music written and recorded within a narrowing range of time.

“Okay,” you may say. “Great. But what is the point of writing about it?”  I am not in a position to tell you to run out and buy a record player and neglect your homework for the next few hours by putting on “Abbey Road” or “channel ORANGE.”  Nor am I trying to say that, because I call myself a musician, your reasons for not caring about the future well-being of the album are less valid than my feelings to the contrary. What I would like to do, though, is force you to zoom out of the latest trends or technologies and give you a way to look at popular music in the grand scheme, with an eye towards where things are headed down the road.  Yes, you will have to do it through my eyes, and you will inevitably have to take my tastes and personal experience with music into account.  But I will try my best to look at a wide range of things—Kanye to The Killers, albums to singles, chart-toppers to B-side flops—as I talk about what makes albums different, why their purpose and position in music has evolved, and whether or not they can be saved going forward. In the end, my goal is not to change your tastes (although if you are really into Nickelback, we might have a problem). Instead I want to look at music in a way that helps me understand why I fell in love with the album and that helps you understand why you “do music” the way you do—and hopefully I will able able to convince enough Baha Men lovers, Nickelback haters, and obsessive Urban Outfitters shoppers to join me.