A Life Without Music

As evidenced by my blog, music is a central part of my life. To imagine a life without it is akin to imagining a world without love. It’s inconceivable.

My morning routine is remarkably the same no matter the day: I wake, make coffee, feed and care for the cat, and then listen to something/anything—though rarely Todd Rundgren—for five, six or seven hours, sometimes longer. I write during that time, of course, but goof off, too. I surf the web, flip through the poetry tomes I keep beside me, take frequent cat breaks, etc., and even carry said feline overlord to see his other subject, Diane.

Track 112 of Neil Young’s Archives Vol. III, an acoustic rendition of “Powderfinger” recorded live at the Boarding House in San Francisco, is currently beaming via Bluetooth from my ancient MacBook Pro to my stereo shelf system. (FYI for those who’ve followed the Archives Vol. III debacle via my prior “Daily Prompt” entries: the massive set is finally available to stream via the Neil Young Archives website.) I plan to listen to the collection until I finish this piece, then move onto Lea Thomas’s forthcoming Cosmos Forever. 

In years past, I departed our suburban Philly home most weekday mornings and headed to the office, only to do the reverse in the late afternoon or early evening. I listened to the radio during those commutes, flipping between all-news KYW 1060 (for traffic and weather) and singer-songwriter central, WXPN, but also played cassettes and, later, CDRs—copies of favorite albums and/or new additions and/or homemade mixes. Over time, I integrated MP3 players into the equation—first an iRiver, then a Creative Zen, and finally a 160-gig iPod—but shiny platters remained a constant from about 2001 until 2019, when I purchased the Mazda3 Time Machine, which didn’t come with a CD player.

Music is about more than filling silence, however. As I explained in an essay about my fleeting meet-and-greet with the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen, “Life can be challenging. We wake, roll out of bed and, often, dread the day to come—maybe it’s the morning commute or pile of work awaiting us at the office; perhaps a dead-end job for dead-end wages; or, at times, something much, much worse. But the music takes us away from whatever it is, albeit for a few minutes, and helps us muster the strength to soldier on. On the flip side, it elevates life’s wondrous moments in ways that are near-impossible to put into print.”

Not long after Diane and I bonded over Nanci Griffith in early 1989, for instance, I introduced her to the wonderful world of Bruce Springsteen bootleg CDs. I still remember her bliss-filled face while we listened to a pristine soundboard recording of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” from a 1978 show in Charleston, West Va., in her old apartment. Now, whenever I hear that song, that moment fills my mind’s eye.

One of the pictures I chose to accompany this post is of CDRs that I burned in the late 2000s, when I was in a very nostalgic frame of mind—the disc on the bottom right, a rip of Neil Diamond’s Tap Root Manuscript, is the tip-off. Whenever I listen to it, and I still do from time to time, I picture my mother circa the early 1970s bopping along to the poppier tunes and singing with “The African Trilogy.” It’s magical how music retrieves such old memories from the brain’s attic.

Anyway, I’ll close where I began:  To imagine a life without music is akin to imagining a world without love. It’s inconceivable.