Thinking about the Music on my iPod

I was sitting in DuPont Circle last night waiting to meet up with friends for dinner. I was listening to my iPod and watching people head home from work. I’m not sure how I started thinking about this well I have some idea my thought was about how important music is in life.

How amazing to have my iPod with almost 13,000 songs on it. How wonderful it is to have my music in this little device and being able to listen to it anytime I want to (as long as I remember to keep it charged).

I started thinking it didn’t use to be that way. There was the portable CD player. You could play a CD of music at a time. Your access to music was limited by how many CD you could carry. Then there was the Walkman. More flexibility in that you could make you own tapes of the songs you wanted. Sort of your own personal version of the shuffle button. But you have to make the tapes yourself either from CDs or records. Remember all the different grades of tapes you could buy. I remember the huge space at Tower Records devoted to tapes. I think chrome was the most expensive one. I have to say I’m not sure you could tell all that much difference in the sound quality unless you bought a really really cheap tape.

But then I thought back to before even the Walkman. There was the boom box. Before that the transistor radio. The radio was about it. And with that you had to wait for the station to play the songs you liked. It was also the time of listening to records on your stereo. If you were lucky one you were able to buy and put in your own room.

It got me thinking about the first album I bought for myself. Not a 45 or something you got off a cereal box (remember those!). But a real actual album which probably cost all of $5 bucks. The first album I bought was Close to You by the Carpenters. I’d seen them on TV (I think it might have been the Carol Burnett Show) and really like the song Close to You. I bought the album at Lakehurst Shopping Center. It was the only mall around. There wasn’t a record store in the mall so I bought it at department store. I’m not sure which one. Maybe it was Montgomery Wards. I do very distinctly remember taking the album out of the rack and walking to the cash register to buy it.

I believe somewhere in my house is that album. When I moved into my house I got rid of almost all of my albums. It just didn’t make sense to move them. I saved a few. I have to say I regret throwing out a couple. Because some things you still cannot get from Amazon (either as a digital download or a CD) or from iTunes.

My point to all of this is just how wonderful it is to have this device with the music you love on it that you can hear at anytime. Listening can pick you up if you are having a bad day or make a good day even better.