On an recent unseasonably warm November night, I was driving around, windows down, blasting Elgin Avenue Breakdown: Revisited, a 2005 compilation of live tracks, singles and assorted studio recordings by Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band The 101ers. It’s a terrific set that I bought several months ago, and finally got around to playing only after watching the documentary The Future Is Unwritten, which piqued my curiosity. It was such a pleasant way to spend an evening, cranking up songs like “Letsagetabitarockin'” and “Keys To Your Heart” without worrying about any impending deadline to write about them, or whether a review of The 101ers would be picked at for being “too obvious” or “too obscure.” That night, I began to wish I could retreat from the front lines of music criticism for a while, and disappear into the archives instead, where the stakes are lower and the people are friendlier. And then I thought, “Hell, I’m a freelancer. No one’s forcing me to do anything.” So I made a resolution.
Beginning January 1st, I’m taking an indefinite hiatus from record reviewing. And I’m going even further than that. For the first ten months of the year, I’m not going to buy or listen to any new music. I’m not even going to buy any new old music. I’m going to spend those months dealing with what I’ve already got on hand–which is, frankly, more than any normal person should ever need. Even though I’ve made a big push in recent years to store and organize my music, I still have piles of discs on nearly every available surface of my home, and I have a hard drive groaning with songs that I’m unlikely to revisit, taking up space that could be filled by music I love. And because I spend the majority of any given week checking out CDs that I might need to write about, most of the time these days, I’m listening to music that I don’t particularly like.
And honestly, it’s getting to the point that I can’t really hear that music anymore. Increasingly I’ll pop in a disc full of heavily orchestrated indie-pop or foursquare roots-rock or singer-songwriter acoustica and I’ll think to myself that what I’m hearing is just fine–and in fact may be better in craft and execution than similar music that I’ve loved in the past–yet I find myself incapable of working up any genuine enthusiasm for it.
I don’t know whether people who don’t review music for a living can identify with that dilemma, but surely many of you, in this media-saturated age, have been faced with a logjam of shows on your TiVo, or a Netflix queue you can’t keep up with, or loose CDs strewn about your car, or more books than your shelves can hold. I think a lot of us have a packrat impulse, and like to believe that everything we’ve acquired over the years will come in handy somewhere down the line. But then one day we’re trying to straighten up the clutter, and we find a still-shrinkwrapped DVD of Spider-Man 2 that our aunt got us for Christmas, and we wonder whether we really need it.
Let me give you a couple of examples from my hard drive. These are songs I’ve picked up from some source or another, and am now trying to decide whether to keep or trash. First up, Richard Reagh’s cover of Neil Young’s “Hangin’ On A Limb,” featuring El Perro Del Mar doing the Emmylou Harris part.: