The Thrill is Gone…

Music has been a part of my life since I was a young child.

My earliest memories were of 50s pop hits on the radio—Les Paul and Mary Ford, Patti Page, Gogi Grant, and then all the early Rock ‘n’ Rollers: Little Richard; Chuck Berry; Jerry Lee Lewis; Buddy Holly; and all the rest of the greats. Even “The Day the Music Died” didn’t kill my interest—radio music in the early 60s was a strange mix of genres— and the arrival of The Beatles in 1964 dramatically changed the situation. My buddies and I had already started a band and seeing the “Mop-tops” on Ed Sullivan only stoked that fire.

That was then, and this is now, I have a half-century of musical water under the (not-yet-burned) bridge. What have I to show for it? 300 CDs of music that I seldom listen to, a handful of self-produced albums and, lately, a predilection towards the sound of silence. In the last twenty years, I’ve been exploring Icelandic music of various types but lately even that lode seems to be on the verge of exhaustion.

In a perverse twist of events, when I was young access to music was limited but what I did get to hear was varied and had cultural roots. The modern music I hear now (usually in the grocery or thrift store) is the aural equivalent of Cheese Whiz™. I’ve dipped my toe into streaming services; I’d rather listen to the birds sing in my back yard than be engulfed in that torrent. Even the screams of bluejays and crows are more enjoyable than autotune.

So… it appears as if I’ve finally become the cranky old geezer that my mother warned me against becoming.

The situation isn’t a dire as my hyperbole in this post would suggest, however, I just needed to vent a little.