Grave Considerations: Music Hoarding

There has been an issue in my life for the longest of times, and I have tried to parse some sense out of it for years; I’ve never really been successful, or at best, I’ve never found any of my conclusions to be satisfactory in the long run. So, once more we will try it again.

For years, more than a decade, I have been a hoarder of music. I would usually go to my local record shops and buy a large quantity of new music on paydays: that, still, is one of my most favorite and comfortable memory templates. Leaving work on a Friday, pay stub in hand, stopping at my band and getting some money for weekend fun, and then spending $100 on new music. I never felt bad about this at all. But, back then, I’d usually end up listening to most of that new music over the weekend, or the course of the next week or so. Rarely would I have a pile of things sitting around for too long. I’d like some things and dislike some others; I’d have records I was anticipating and some that I picked up because they caught my interest in the store. But it didn’t matter, nothing sat unheard for long. I always seemed to know what the new music in the metal scene was.

Then, one week in early 2005, I ordered a batch of CDs from a distro that was having a sale. I can name probably most of what came in that shipment, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Then, as has become my Thomas and Martha killed in an alley moment, the origin story that seems to be required by almost any and all retellings of events in my life, my father died a week or so later. I was in a bad place, musically: I love music, and it brings me so much happiness and comfort and respite, but at the time when I was really in need of those things, I didn’t want to listen to music. An attempt at retail therapy lead me back to that distro and their continuing sale, and I bought another large batch of music.

There are still records from that pile that I have not heard yet. It has been 12 years.

I don’t even own some of those albums physically anymore, but lug their digital counterparts around on my iPod every day. I scroll past them every day. Some of them are from bands that I really love, and I still can’t listen to them.

But I don’t think that this is a result of a death in the family. I really don’t. I have always had a large music collection. Twice I’ve moved hundreds of CDs from living space to living space, and before our move to our current apartment, I sold off a few hundred all at once. As my life moved forward, and technology allowed me access to more music, I continued this hoarding behavior. Adopting an iPod allowed me to transport thousands of records in my pocket, something that was never going to be possible before. Access to digital music and the Internet fueled my musical curiosity, and let me obtain not only individual albums, but full discographies of bands that I may have nothing more than a passing interest in. Whereas in the past, I was limited by what I could find, or what the store carried, or what was available through distros or special orders. The Internet changed that. Now, if I remember some album I heard and was ambivalent to in 2006, I can not only find it, but every album before and after it. I went from amassing individual releases to stacking discography upon discography in my “To Hear” pile. Before, owning a bands’ entire catalog was something reserved for favorite bands; now, it’s something I do because a review on a website for the most recent album sounded intriguing. And then, I don’t just find that specific album, but all of them. As my wife will point out to any who listen when the topic of music comes up in conversation, my computer has a terabyte hard drive, and 502 gigs are music. I have friends who will marvel at my iPod when they realize that it contains full catalogs by bands. My iPod currently holds 2,093 albums. And they are albums: with very, very few exceptions, I don’t have single songs, but full albums. Not sure why I mention that, other than I feel it adds weight to the weightless digital music, or a sense of scale for something that is formless. But I have full catalogs of bands I haven’t heard, and that in many cases I am only curious about. Why? Do I really believe that I need a comprehensive, encyclopedic knowledge of a band, for any real purpose? Does listening to one album really benefit from having heard all the others? You know, I remember going to record stores and finding one album from a band, and hearing it and feeling like I knew something about said band, without having any mind of absence in my life or knowledge because they had three others that I was unfamiliar with.  

Part of me doesn’t want to ruin the newness of something. This is an issue that pervades a few avenues of my life: I will rewear the same pairs of socks and the same shirts and stuff, all clean, of course, when new, unworn ones exist, and I don’t have any defensible reason as to why, except for that I have some compulsion to keep things new. Not all things, but enough things and with enough regularity that I notice myself and really do think it’s a problem. With music, there are albums we’ve all encountered that are just landmark experiences in our lives, music that we sit back and cannot imagine our lives without. Master of Puppets. Borknagar’s Quintessence: oh man, there’s a real possibility that that album is one of the most memorable listening experiences of my entire life. There’s music that strikes a certain mood or tone in our lives, and when we hear it, we are returned to that moment or that place or time or whatever it is, like an anchor that holds us there, but not in any kind of bad way. Xasthur’s Telepathic With the Deceased, Soilwork’s A Predator’s Portrait and most pre-2006 Cradle of Filth albums do this, as do other albums that are no longer with me: Jag Panzer’s Thane to the Throne is the one that popped into my mind, for some strange reason. Some strange part of my mind doesn’t want to spoil what could be another one of those albums. What if in this stack of CDs is the next Quintessence? What about brand new music? Because I do that too. A few weeks back I was scrolling through iTunes and realized that there have been three Crowbar records since the last one I remember hearing. Three. And yet, all the new ones are on my iPod, so I have actively recognized them as existing; I can’t just claim that I was unaware. Why can I not listen to that new stuff?

That I occasionally do try to do. A couple weeks back, I spent my mornings playing Dragon Age: Inquisition and actually listening to some new albums. So I’ve heard 2017’s offerings from Suffocation and Dying Fetus and Obituary and Life of Agony, and the new Rage that just came out, and I think that may be it. Whenever I do listen to something old (or new) that I’ve been putting off, I actually feel some type of strange accomplishment. I’ll tell my wife, “Today, I heard an album I haven’t heard before,” and then sometimes what it was, not that she’d be familiar with whatever it was. My wife and I are total music opposites. She likes a few bands and a handful of records that she will listen to over and over and over again. I have an iPod of 2,100 albums, from I don’t even know how many bands or artists. The most played record on my iPod is We Are Motörhead at like 25 plays. But if I try to tell her that I finally heard that Azaghal album from like 2009, it doesn’t mean anything to her, and it’s not like it really should. But she does often say something supportive when I can offer her such a report, because she knows this is a thing of mine.

But how illogical is all this? I don’t want to listen to some new album, new being relative, because then it won’t be new any longer? What if it ends up being an important album, and by listening to it and realizing that, I would somehow be ruining something? What? See, it never has made any sense. It began as a backlog, and mutated into a seemingly insurmountable blockade. Thinking about it is making me feel all tight in the chest. I’ve thought up plans to tackle this before, like, what if I just listened to everything on my iPod, from the first track to the last in order? That way, I’d at least hear everything, right? While that could work, it’d also be kind of crazy.

I feel like I really have to be able to devote time and attention to new music, not to be a real hipster about it, but that I need to really “hear” it, and not just listen to things. Yeah, I know. I feel like in my younger days, I was able to retain so much of what I heard, while now, it seems I’ll hear something once or twice and have no real recollection of it, which will cause me to feel like I hadn’t heard it at all. That may just be a by-product of my busy lifestyle, though, and may not really be a problem. The real issue seems to be not wanting to destroy the newness of things. I have an issue with shortage as well, or perceived shortages. When we start getting low on shampoo or something, I start worrying that we’re somehow never going to have shampoo again. Theirs is one Take the Black stout from Ommegang Brewery in my fridge that has been there for almost a year. An excellent stout, it is part of their Game of Thrones line of beers, and is a limited release. What if I never find it in the store again? Of course the brewery could solve this for me just by making it a wider release, but I’m the one with the problem here. If I drink that bottle, I may never find it again. So instead, it sits in my fridge, unenjoyed, and defeating its own purpose.

That kind of inability to let something go, or that compulsion to view things as being irreplaceable or prone to shortage and thus worthy of being saved is prime hoarder behavior. My mother was a hoarder, and I saw it creep into most parts of our home, and really blow up after my dad died; not, for her, out of some kind of grief, but because there was one less person in the house, and so the hoard was able to spread. But I hoard this thing that I love, this stuff that really does enrich my life like pretty much nothing else does, that would be a categorical improvement in my life were I to embrace it rather than squirrel it away.

Perhaps these albums came at inopportune times in my life, and so they just weren’t able to be experienced in a fashion they would have truly benefit from when they were new. I do have a strange tendency to not want to listen to music during ill times, lest it become welded to the general feeling of said time: for me, music is a really powerful tether to the emotion or sensation of the past. When I first started dating the woman who would become my wife, I was listening to three or four albums in really heavy rotation, and to this very day, nine and a half years later, hearing those albums, or thinking about those albums, or getting a snippet of those albums coursing through my brain, is enough to transport me back to those early nights of our relationship. The same goes for negative feelings: the very first note of My Dying Bride’s The Light At The End of The World takes me back to the brief overlap in time between my being released by one school I was teaching at and being hired by the school I would spend the next six years at. At the time, a time of uncertainty and real roller coaster emotions, I was listening to that album a lot, so it became a permanent part of the memories of those days. Maybe I would purposely put off listening to music that was new at the time so as to prevent it from being inextricably connected to certain times.

But that’s not entirely true, as there are plenty of records that I’ve heard and heard again during times terrific or not so that have no indelible connection to said times. So, is it fear of forging that connection that would keep me from listening to some of these things? A nihilism settles in: am I ever going to hear all of this? Will I *die* before I am able to listen to all this potentially great music? If so, and the venture is pointless, why do I keep it, instead of either deleting it or at very least removing it from my iPod? How irrational a thought is all of this? And so the mental and emotional carousel continues spinning, and there does not seem to be any way to get off of it.

Ideally, engaging in this monologue would have allowed me to figure out this deeply perplexing and occasionally troubling habit of mine, and I have mixed feelings on whether it was successful or not. I feel that all I did was restate a number of things; and yet, at times during the writing, I felt a sort of cathartic relief as I was, if nothing else, confessing. I don’t know that I got any closer to any answer, but it does feel like I gained a little more understanding, even if I can’t express of what. I think that’s one of the big issues I have with this matter: I can’t put it into words. I know something is wrong, but I can’t express what or why, or even how it makes me feel. It’s Lovecraftian. I don’t know if I feel any better about it, or if I have gained any more insight or understanding. Maybe I never will understand it; maybe I never will listen to all that music. Suddenly, it all feels incredibly pointless, never-ending; yet, I can’t bring myself to do anything about it. If you’re not going to listen to it, why bother having it? My wife has previously suggested that I “simply” remove all the excess from my iPod: I put ‘simply’ in quotations because it is not at all simple. The very idea makes me seize up, and my chest tightens. That’s the kind of response that makes me think that this is a fairly serious problem, and not some cute and dumb foible of mine. I feel panic at the thought of trimming away the unheard excess, even though I know it won’t really be lost. The thought of not having all those unheard albums terrifies me. Earlier, I mentioned my mother being an actual hoarder, and I occasionally do fear that I am one as well. It’s reactions like the terror of slimming down my digital music hoard that makes me experience another terror, that of being an actual hoarder, and what that would mean for my wife and my cat if it were true. What would they do or think if they knew? Am I really a hoarder? Do I really have a problem?

Again, an exercise that was supposed to uncover answers or provide a path to working out some hang ups, winds up merely raising more questions, and causing more of that tight-chested feeling that this venture was intended to help alleviate.

As I sit here finishing this, it is 10 am on Saturday, and I am thinking of what I’ll listen to today. Maybe I can try to work through two new records, although one would be quite an accomplishment. So I start scrolling through iTunes, looking: what’s new, unheard. Do I try something from this year or last? Do I go back to the digital copies of that large distro order from 2005? Where does one start? There’s something I should listen to, finally, because we have company coming over tomorrow, and they keep talking about this particular record that I have genuine enthusiasm for, but just can’t listen to. If I heard that, I could finally talk about it with people tomorrow. But even as I contemplate these questions, my chest is squeezing, and I feel panic settling in. I don’t know what I’m going to do just yet, but I’m going to try and reach a conclusion.

Wish me luck, I guess.

No matter how today’s experiment goes, I’ll still be here trying to solve this puzzle.