Keep Calm And Carry CDs

Friday is fun because there's playlists. There's music. And today, CDs!

I talked a bit about all the books I bought on my recent holiday – and not just me, the whole family is obsessed with buying books and I mentioned there also that I bought about 20 CDs while away. In 2023.

I’ve talked a bit about CDs recently, and my weird journey back to them…

It's culminated in my buying a Discman. My first Discman in about 20 years. And my first with serious intent in more like 30 years…

I started buying CDs in 1993, a bit of a late bloomer really. I’d been buying cassette tapes since 1987 and I loved the format. I loved my Walkman. I loved the price. Obsessed with the music of the 60s and 70s when I was in my teens, I was able to buy tapes for $5-$10 when new releases were more like $20. When the CD came along, I didn’t want to make the price-jump, and I didn’t have a stereo with a player. My folks still had records for a while – and it wasn’t until my dad won a CD player in a sales competition (how very New Zealand in the early 1990s!) that we made the change. And I was resistant at first – but when I moved to Wellington and found stores that carried jazz, that had the soundtracks to the films I loved, that had back-catalogues of artists like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and Prince…well, finally I was in, yo!

All through my first year at university I hunted out bargains, and my CD collection grew – I had well over 100. Then I had 200…

A couple of years later I had my first record store job, and the staff discount made me the envy of some of my friends. (800 CDs and counting…)

A few years on, I started reviewing CDs, and I figured I should keep everything I reviewed – not just a trophy or a prize, but “for reference”, and so the CD collection started to get out of control. If I was playing in a band, I bought bargain CDs of any of the songs I was learning. The CDs were the story of my listening.

At my peak, I had something like 7000 compact discs.

But I was also buying LPs. And vinyl was suddenly a lot cooler (again)– and CDs were hard to shelve when you had that many. I had this monstrous shelving unit that my father had built, and when we moved house and thought about starting a family the CD collection just seemed absurd. I also had this new ritual of buying sealed vinyl LPs and saving them for when people came around. That was fun for a while. You’d get to choose a record – like going to a wine cellar and dusting off a special bottle. Maybe someone had never heard B.B. King’s Live at The Regal, or the Bernard Herrmann score for Taxi Driver. Or they hadn’t heard them for years and bloody years…

I was trading off my CD collection in huge piles, all those ‘free’ review copies (they were never really free, they were the payment, and the catalyst for intrusions into my private life also) made for a good way to bolster the record collection.

Eventually,  about 10 years ago or so, I had gone from 7000+ CDs to about 20 or 30. All I had now were the special ones. Things people had given me and signed, CDs with stories…

And then, during the lockdown, my obsession with collecting movie scores took a turn. And vinyl’s cost is now largely prohibitive. And space is always the final frontier. Where can you put all those records when you’re not listening to them? I sold most of my records, had a huge spiritual cleanse, and started buying some of the soundtrack albums that were either never released on vinyl or were just absurdly priced in that format.

The CDs started arriving weekly – from TradeMe and second-hand stores, and sometimes as gifts from people ditching their collections. One or two readers posted me a CD or two because they had things they knew I would be after. (Thank you!)

Now, I have a few hundred CDs. And though it’s mostly soundtracks, and classical, and easy listening and ambient – that whole sweep of a ‘genre’ – I also make room to buy or pick up a few old favourites. Some jazz, some Prince and Dylan and Pink Floyd…and I have no shame in telling you that I now only nearly every Enya CD. (No shame!)

And some albums just suit the format. I started a new column, about the sound and feel and vibe and memories of CDs. For the first one, I wrote about Suzanne Vega’s Nine Objects of Desire. An album I first purchased for full price and loved more than anything. And one I recently bought (in America) for $1. I’ve never owned Nine Objects on vinyl, and never really thought about that. But having this CD in my possession (again) feels like some sort of trophy! And, um, well, I’ve met Suzanne Vega. I’ve interviewed her, I’ve got her first two (classic) albums personally autographed (and a copy of her book of poems and lyrics signed to me to). But weirdly, the shape and feel and memories of the CD – and of course its amazing music – feels like the crown jewel.

That’s possibly nuts.

But I’ve learned, long ago, to just go with such feelings, such movements.

My morning routine, for the last year or two, is that I’ll be up at 5 or 6am and I have the house ‘to myself” for an hour or two (or three). And I’ll sit next to my little mini-system (another throwback) and listen to a CD or two (or three). It’s become a little ritual. And, as Frank Zappa famously said, “Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid”.

And, yeah, I could be flipping a vinyl, or listening to YouTube or Spotify or Bandcamp, and actually sometimes that is happening – but the dominant format, now, is the compact disc.

It's something I never saw happening. But it’s a nice wee quirk.

I like the finite choice, the idea that what is on the shelf is what is on offer. I sometimes think, as with all streaming and infinite choice, that this is the problem. That’s what I love about visiting bookstores. It’s about what is in that store, not what is available in the world. And so it is with a CD collection. The decisions have been made; this is what is on offer. This is what is here.

So, I’m not planning on going everywhere with my Discman. I’ll still use my phone and listen to a mix of music, podcasts, and audiobooks. But I now also have the option of going for a walk with a Discman and just one or two CDs. And I remember what that was like. Going out for the night with a Discman in my bag and a couple of brand new deluxe edition David Bowie CDs to crank on the walk there and back. Magical!

And I can’t wait to try that out. Again.

But hey, I know I celebrate the playlist here, and being into one thing never means saying goodbye completely to another – so today I have two for you. A longer one I made filled with songs that give off calm vibes (for me, anyway). And which I think you might like:

And our regular volume of A Little Something For The Weekend.

Thanks for reading all of this – and let me know what you think about CDs? Are they back in your life? Did they never go away? Are they a reluctant final choice or the main attraction? Do you love their, erm, compact size and format. Or did you never like the little square beasts with their reduction of record-cover artwork?