Music that I listen to might be classified as "classic rock."

Hook and I went to Amoeba tonight so that I could pick up a copy of "Cherry Peel," which I had years ago and loved, but which I lost when I ditched my last laptop. (This is one argument against buying all your albums from iTunes/stealing music: when you're as lazy as I am re: backing up music, you lose everything when you lose a computer. Most people aren't as lazy as I (in this regard; in most other regards, they are lazier), but the threat remains.) I can't say why I had the sudden urge to hear this album again, but last night I was so tempted just to download it and let the nostalgia wash over me. Hook urged me to resist and I did (though I caved and downloaded "Tanglewood Numbers") in favor of getting the actual CD, so that when this computer dies, I won't have to buy the album a third time. Foresight, man: it's what separates us from the animals.

I was first introduced to "Cherry Peel" in 2003 when I received a mix CD (from Hook, coincidentally) with "Springtime is the Season" as the first track. Also in '03, a few pals of mine loved listening to "Tim, I Wish You Were Born a Girl" while swigging Arbor Mist straight from the bottle. The album didn't realize its emotional-nostalgic potential until 2007ish, though, when I was in my second year of grad school. Nights that spring, I'd drive along Route 9 in the beige Toyota that is no longer mine, reveling in the balminess of the air, the waft of lilacs, the peculiar, constrained brand of freedom common to grad students everywhere. The album came to represent, for me, the contentment that can result from isolation - or, if not contentment, then familiarity. I had "Montreal" on repeat as I drove back from that namesake city, stilled by Vermont's tree-to-human ratio, the remoteness of my traveling companion. "I Can't Stop Your Memory" recalls my inadequately-heated tenement of an apartment, the paint peeling from the floorboards of my room; drive-thrus at McDonald's long after bar time; heartache of the brand that should have run its course years earlier. "Cherry Peel," in short, is the album that reminds me why I'm obsessed with certain albums in the first place: its personal contexts are so thickly sedimented that a full listen brings to mind two distinct and distinctly formative times in my life. I love that, that songs can become psychic shorthand and shuttle us back to what we sometimes think of as gentler times, but what were really times of equal indifference viewed with naivete and longing.