one year later.

Last year at this time I was cruising around the South Island of New Zealand, listening to A Tribe Called Quest with my punk rock friend. You might remember my New Year's resolution from the time, which was basically to stock up on historic music and spend more time listening to the essentials.

(Aside: Christ, there's some purple prose in that post.)

I don't know that that worked out very well, although I did pick up LIVE AT THE APOLLO. Paradoxically, I found myself paying closer attention to new music than I had in several years, which I credit in large part to my participation here and the podcasts.

This year at this time, I am in northern Michigan (Harbor Springs, in the northwest corner of the lower peninsula) with my family at my godparents' house. We drove up yesterday, and my brother and I found ourself in the front seat while my parents were in the back seat. This was unexpected, and so we weren't prepared with CDs for the car. But there were the albums that are always there, two albums I'd have mentioned several weeks back in the discussion about parents and their music tastes: Simon & Garfunkel's THE CONCERT IN CENTRAL PARK and the soundtrack to THE BIG CHILL. And, of course, these tracks have a lot of history and a lot of memories for me, being two of the few CDs that my parents listened to on a regular basis. (The third, JOHN DENVER'S GREATEST HITS, wasn't in its case.)

I'm interested in how music affects people, I have been for a long time. I think about that feeling singing along with a friend to "Luck of Lucien" on the South Island, or the happiest day I had in a long time when I was driving to a friend's house and the sun was setting and New Order's "Run 2" popped on the iPod.

If you think this is leading up to a description of how these tracks affected me, you're wrong, because they didn't very much, mostly brought back memories of the past, and my previous New Year's resolution.

Which encapsulates one of my major problems: feeling guilty or feeling responsible for something that should be pure, unmitigated joy. If I was trying to make a living as a music journalist or historian or musician or cognitive scientist, then maybe making resolutions about music would make sense. But ultimately it was just kind of silly. Arguably, most resolutions are, but this was sillier than most.

And so I make this year's resolution, which is to care less about what I'm supposed to do and feel more about what I am doing. I don't know that I can explain this very well, but it has to do with the sense, for instance, that I had a couple weeks back that I should quit this blog because of the responsibility. And now I think: fuck that noise. I mean, it's writing a little bit about music or whatever the hell once a week, it's not taking care of a child or something. The worst that happens if I completely fail is that you find some other way to distract yourself on any given Sunday. And you're all grown-ups (I assume). Not. A. Crisis.

So hopefully 2008 will see less self-directed guilt trips and less agonizing and more simple reflections on the joy of music. (It may even see the end of my island series!) At the risk of overcommitting, however, there's a good chance it will see another project rear its head.

I mentioned my interest in how music affects people. I really believe it does, I really believe it can change lives. Not necessarily in grand ways. But I really believe your outlook will change if you listen to nothing but death metal for a week, or listen to nothing but Bach for a week, or so on.

But belief is not enough. So I intend to try to prove it.

Over the course of the next year, I will attempt to find weeks where, for that week, I listen to a single artist with a focused vision and nothing else. This will be hard, given my vocation (especially as I'm cutting a music series from February to May) and will undoubtedly be sporadic. But I'm really interested. Because if I saw, ultimately, that my quality of life was better when I listened to Bach than when I listened to Damien Jurado, should that change my habits of what I listen to?

Anyway. If you have any nominations for what will henceforth be called The Wack Experiment (after Mike D'Angelo's similarly single-minded experiment in auteur theory), let me know. I'll probably have to gather music to make it happen. Excluded are artists who have significantly changed their sound over time (The Boredoms, Lou Reed, Neil Young). Or there's some where I'll skip outlying albums (i.e. Albert Ayler is in, but NEW GRASS is out).