I've got so much new music, I don't know what to do. I'm buried under a mountain of new CDs, and my only chance of survival is to listen my way out. But it's like the myth of what happens when you equidistantly place two bales of hay on either side of a mule: It gets so worked up and confused about which one to go to that it ends up paralyzed, frozen in place, until it inevitably starves to death. I am a mule.
The other problem with all this new music is that it's all really, really good. In the last few weeks I've picked up the new Sondre Lerche (fantastic), the new Modest Mouse (off-the-charts good), the new Fountains of Wayne (great, minus the two singles) and I even managed to get my grubby little hands on the new Wilco, which isn't even due out until May. So I've got a lot of work ahead of me.
But how to listen to it all without my head exploding? For a brief time I considered hooking up several CD players and sampling all of the albums at once, simultaneously; like going to a party and eavesdropping on several conversations at the same time; or maybe trying to fit all the hors d'Ã?uvres into my mouth at the same time. I was later advised by several friends that this was a bad idea (""So stupid it drools,"" commented one friend) and have since returned the three sets of patch cords I bought from Radio Shack.
Then I toyed with the idea of some kind of grand listening marathon: play each CD, back to back, until I am finished with all of them. But then I thought about it a little more, and concluded that the kind of stamina and endurance required for such an event would require Triathlon-level dedication and training, neither of which I possess.
But so now I'm left with the conundrum of what the hell to do with these CDs. I'm worried the pressure will simply get to be so great that I am forced to quit the project altogether: I will take all my new music and throw it in the garbage, or maybe down the disposal unit in my sink. Or perhaps I will go to James Madison Park and use the CDs as Frisbees to throw at innocent passers-by. I can just picture a jogger, innocently making his or her way down Gorham, when all of a sudden—BAM!—We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank cracks them in the skull. If none of these ideas pan out, maybe I'll find something more constructive to do with the discs: Turn them into an arts and crafts project, decorative wallpaper or something.
Or maybe I could take some more CDs out of my collection (the other stressful ones: the ones that aren't ""new"" but are new to me and so still feel dragooning) and turn them into an elaborate fort. Fort Disco. The Digital Fortress. Strawberry Forts Forever. I'll have to come up with a better name.
I suppose the wise thing to do would be to simply ration them out, spend a week or so getting acquainted with each disc and then move on to the next one with no concern for speed or manic alacrity. But this is a very difficult notion for me. Because the second I put on, for instance, the new Wilco, my mind starts to drift: Boy, what was that song on the new Modest Mouse that I liked so much? How did it go? Man, I feel guilty I'm not listening to that right now. Maybe I should switch. No, no, don't do that, because then you'll just end up wondering which new Wilco track has the best guitar solo, but there's that great bass solo on the Fountains of Wayne and wouldn't you rather hear that? And so on and so on and so on until, quite frankly, my brain explodes.
Wish me luck.
