music and i

For most of my life, I thought I was insane. At least a little.

Ever since I was a kid, I never knew anyone who listened to music the way I did. I would listen to bands no one else liked, take in huge amounts of strange music whenever I could, and never seemed to be able to connect with anybody when it came to the music I loved.

My idea of a fun afternoon was sitting in my living room surrounded by my mom and dad's CD collections, listening to hundreds of artists I'd never heard before, and building up a collection of random music knowledge that impressed no one beyond a few uncles who were amused that I knew Bono's real name.

Up until I decided to come to the Mount, I still thought I was crazy. I would occasionally find friends who would be able to tolerate some of my music, but even then I knew they were just humoring me. I was alone and crazy, and I had accepted it.

Then, the summer before my freshman year, a funny thing happened.

I attended Virgin Fest at the Pimlico Race Course in July, where I would see the Beastie Boys, LCD Soundsystem, Peter Bjorn & John, the Fratellis, Modest Mouse, and a handful of other bands. (Unfortunately I could only afford a ticket for the first day, so I missed an even better lineup on day two.)

I brought my friend Mandy with me because of one more band that was playing that day: Incubus, her favorite band in the world.

While we were in the crowd waiting for that band, she took off into the mass of people in front of us, weaving herself between impossibly small gaps to get closer to the stage, completely losing me in the process. So while she took off, I stood helplessly in the middle of the crowd.

The high point came not from the band itself, but from a remarkably small woman who pushed her way through the masses and found a spot directly in front of me.

After a few minutes, I noticed she was taking frantic notes on a small pad of paper, with a professional label on the top that said “Spin Magazine.” Which happened to be my favorite music magazine at the time, and still is to this day.

I was apparently staring pretty intently at this discovery, because she turned around and took notice. After a brief conversation, she too turned and headed up toward the stage.

At that point, I already knew that music journalism was what I wanted to do, without a doubt in my mind. So when I got back home later that night, I looked up the Spin writer who covered Incubus at the festival and sent her a sprawling email asking what I should do to basically get her job.

To my surprise, she wrote back, with a surprisingly extensive response. In her email, she recommended that I get a few anthologies by a guy named Lester Bangs, who I had only known at that point as a character from Almost Famous. Apparently he was a real guy.

So I bought the first two books I could find, but I never found time to read them until college. Three pages into the anthology “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” I realized I wasn't crazy.

It was as if someone had tapped into my manic relationship with music and put it down on paper.

“It's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record. Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.”

Those might as well have been my exact words. For once I wasn't alone. A chance encounter with a Spin writer in the crowd of an Incubus performance lead me to pure enlightenment.

From there my musical appetite became truly insatiable. And today I have a music library of 30,000+ songs, with an ever-expanding list of 250+ bands I still hope to listen to at some point before I die, and a music column that is completely indebted to those anthologies that random writer told me to buy.

The oddness of that whole experience hit me in full today as I sat down trying to figure out what to write about this week, so I decided to share it with you all. I hope you enjoyed it.

- 3/1/11