I clean out my CD collection periodically. I guess part of my obsessive nature is that I don’t like to hang on to music that I don’t really listen to. The money I get for selling them is only a fraction of what I paid, but I take it as the price I pay for impulse buys.
Keane is a good example… I love “Somewhere Only We Know” and my friends raved about them, so I grabbed the disc for $8.99 at Target. But I wasn’t impressed, and I already had the aforementioned single on a Paste sampler, so $3 was worth more to me than a CD I wouldn’t really play. Off they went to my used store of the month.
Today is another clean out, mostly prompted by an upcoming Chuck Klosterman book. But even though there are several discs I rarely play, some of them retain too many fond memories to sell.
Most of my Caedmon’s Call catalogue falls into that category. I never listen to In the Company of Angels, and I skip more than half of the tracks on Back Home. (I rarely even play 40 Acres, and it’s my favorite!)
I feel like I should load my favorite tracks onto iTunes and get rid of the hard copies. Besides the questionable ethics of that, I just can’t abandon the albums. I bought ITCOA after I fell for Caedmon’s. It was summer 2002 and I was stuck on a lonely mountain in southern California. Few of the songs resonated with me, but those that did, I loved deeply.
Robinella & the CC String Band are probably on their way to a new home, charming as I do find their album. The fact is, I never listen to it and the memory it elicits is a particularly bad (though now irrelevant) one. “Man Over” is my favorite track but it also reminds me of the tears I shed over someone’s drunkenness. That’s not something I want around.
I radically prefer hard copies to soft copies—hard drives die!
i have a whole box of cds i hardly listen to anymore. i probably should find a record store that buys cds and sell them back. some memories are attached to them, but not enough to make them keepers. i always thought the booklet for STP’s ‘purple’ smelled funny.
What Geof said.
And, if that happened,…talk about some tears being shed!!
Later,
Chris
Likes CC but not Keane? I understand now…
“Man Over” is a good performance. It was rootsy folk and high lonesome at the same time. I heard Robinella perform it on TV and liked it. I think it comes from an old traditional tune of a similar name and theme; sometimes artists use traditional folk tunes as frameworks for writing new songs. In terms of folk-country stuff, as another example, I also like Cash’s stripped-down version of “Flesh and Blood” on his “American Recordings” (Storytellers) album with Willie Nelson.
Hey. I just thought that it was really cool that your name is Carla Jean cause my name is Cara Jean. I thought it to be humorous.
yea, i didn’t like Keane either. I bought that CD on a day I was on a splurge, but the new U2, Joshua Tree, The Killers, Franz, Keane and Dave & Central Park. 3 of those are left in my collection. Guess which ones 😉
Hey Hey!! I recently cleaned out my collection too 🙂 It was hard, but it does feel like there’s less clutter… love & miss you much CJ!
~ les