Music experience is so much different at the moment with Spotify, youtube and all other kinds of streaming services. Don’t get me wrong, I totally love the idea of immediately having all music there with me when being online (this is also a funny one, when I read an interview with Speedy J earlier in the week, the answer on the question ‘what he would want most for the future’, the answer was having all his music, samples and libraries with him at all times when also being offline….but his is a whole other story actually), but sometimes the feeling of gratification was a bit more when we had to make more effort for it.
Back in the days there was this record store in Eindhoven called ‘Bullit’ which was literally the Walhalla of alternative music and when I got my money from my side job I would go there to buy something and listen it over and over in my room. Dedication on getting something. Biking somewhere, having worked a whole day for 1 album that means you really need to love it before you even consider buying something right?
Even before those days I remember I bought my first album with a post company. This was even more nerve wrecking (remember how it felt when you did your first crypto transaction? This is the same thing but then more stretched out over multiple weeks if not months). This album was ‘Parachutes’ from Coldplay and I think I was around 12 years old when I decided I really needed to have this album.
This was all back in the MTV days when MTV was actually still playing music on there. This also actually could be TMF which was ‘the music factory’ aka the Dutch equivalent of MTV, I’m not sure on which channel this actually was. But in the evening I saw this video of ‘Trouble’ passing by and it was by far the most moving song I had heard in a long time. I looked everything up (this was so much more difficult as this was in the pre internet days…man, how did you even find anything back in that time), and I ordered the album which needed to come from overseas.
And it took long. A week passed by, another week passed by. But eventually the album showed up at home, and I had made my first purchase by mail I think ever.
Up until today I still find ‘Trouble’ one of the most moving songs around. I actually would love to learn how to play this on the piano, but that might be a bridge too far for the upcoming years. But the thing is, I don’t really like Coldplay anymore. The second album was nice, and after that it all got a bit too weird and also too poppy and too ‘look at me, I’m so green and eco and wauw I always sing my lines different than they are on album), so I stopped listening to them
And my first bought album? It ended up in the trash after a couple of moving sessions throughout the countries. I didn’t keep a single album from back in the days. Harsh right? But I did listen to ‘Trouble’ on my bike this morning. On Spotify. Lazy as we are