“Vinyl just sounds better man, like, it’s music in its natural habitat, man.”
That, of course, is one stoner’s opinion and it’s not to be discounted because the dude that attended Woodstock, the bud-smokin’ brother who saw the Grateful Dead thirty-nine times and drove his van to the Us Festival knows a shit-ton about two things: vegan restaurants and music.
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about music, about the arrangements, the interplay between instruments and the human voice, the melodic genius that makes a song classic. I think about the dozens of individual performances and the vision of the songwriters that need to be magically synchronized in order to complete what used to be known as a long player. I wonder about the pictures on the cover and the liner notes and the storytelling that was intended in the naming of the songs and the thought that went into ordering the eleven tracks. And as I consider the ways in which music can enrich life and how one killer rock show can change the world, I think mostly about the reasons why there’s a clandestine conspiracy to prevent me from hearing the songs on the CD.