There’s just so dadgum much great music out there that sometimes some of it, no matter how wondrous, gets overlooked. I was music-crazy from the time I was in middle school, so I heard about Nick Drake, for instance, literally decades before I ever actually heard him—I wanted to, I always meant to, but he was a little hard to locate back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and there was always so much other stuff to listen to, or relisten to for the billionth time. There was a new REM import to acquire or an early and unofficial Springsteen live recording or the second side of Low, still waiting to be deciphered.
I then went nearly 10 years between really listening to new music, either because familial obligations kept me from listening to almost anything, or because I went through years-long periods where all I’d listen to was classical or jazz.
And then when I did start actively seeking out and enjoy new music again, well, there’s just so much of it—as well as older masterpieces I’d never heard before, such as the aforementioned Nick Drake—that, well, you realize one day that you haven’t heard “Don’t Worry Baby” since the previous century. But you took the girls to the beach and you brought along a Beach Boys collection and a week later it’s still in the car and on the way to the dentist you turn on the stereo and out comes a song absolutely unsurpassed in its amazingness, so gorgeous, so lush, so complex yet minimal that you listen to it a dozen times in a row and, yeah, no, it's just...wow.
That's what this stuff comes down to sometimes. Sometimes you just sit back and listen for the three hundredth time and think: wow.
So let’s say you’re crusing down the highway in southern California with the Beach Boys blasting and you’re singing along and it’s fine that other drivers can see you singing...but do you think they can tell, without hearing you, that you’re singing falsetto?
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