One of my favorite things about Drew is that he unapologetically loves what he loves. I often joke that he’s still analogue, preferring to do things the slow way, inherently resistant to the digital world, proud of knowing all of the long cuts whenever we get in the car. In keeping with this, a couple of years ago (no! Not a ‘couple’ of years ago…I think this memory is circa 2006. What are you doing to us, Time??) Drew declared that he was taking his music back. He went on a trip of reclaiming songs and albums that he loved from various times in his life no matter how over them the world had become or how overplayed they once had been, which of course made him the coolest in my book. He started building up his music library from high school, getting taken back to sweaty Baton Rouge summers in a gold Jeep Cherokee when he had 6 tapes in constant rotation. Of course I loved this because you know what? Life is too short to worry about people making fun of you or even thinking about you for loving what you love, particularly when you’re just connecting with a feeling you once had through a song. No apologies for harmless loves! None!
So this weekend I was thinking about our music collection and what a wreck it is. We have CDs with nothing but car radios to listen to them on, various iThings that play Pandora and Spotify, but only after a seemingly lengthy log-in process, a dead computer with half of our music loaded on to it, a turn table with no receiver that we both want to play, I only listen to the news on the radio, but with no radio, I now do that daily through my phone…we’re in musical chaos over here. Somehow all of the possibilities of the 21st century have made us manic in our storage, and all we want is to be able to walk into the kitchen and click on Joni Mitchell’s Blue to wake up to on Saturday mornings.
I bring this up for two reasons. The first is to say that Drew’s genius has always lived in his ability to love simple things wholly, and I want to foster that simplicity, and the second is to solicit suggestions. Great wide Web of clever world thinkers, what are all of you doing to solve this music situation? Teach me your ways! What does your music collection look like? How is it stored? When you want to make bread and listen the kind of music that a girl might make bread to, what device are you turning on? I’m going to dedicate part of my maternity leave to cleaning this mess up, but I want to know where to start.
Love,
Missing the old days in Virginia
Flux Capacitating 
We have a really nice iPod dock that works with our phones and iPods etc. It’s nice and easy to put things on and enjoy them, but I do wish we had a simpler way of playing CDs. The iPod dock sits in one room, so I have a cable that plugs into my digital radio if I want to use it as a speaker for my phone in another room. I tend to listen to Radio 4 (spoken word) whenever I’m cooking or want sound so I’m not much help!
My sister-in-law and her husband have a Sonos system. I don’t quite understand what it is, but they have speakers in their ceilings (£££) and can play music in any room off any device (iPhone, iPad, computer, £££) because of some fancy component (£££) on it, and I think you can use any iThingy or Android thingy to control it, but I don’t know about using its speakers for a turntable and if there’s a CD option…. eh, I don’t know, but it sounds like the sort of thing that would work for you if you wanted to really invest (It’s sort of explains it here: http://www.techradar.com/reviews/audio-visual/hi-fi-and-audio/hi-fi-and-av-speakers/sonos-playbar-1130807/review)
I’m there with you!! I have all my old CDs still in the under stair storage and some have been imported to iTunes, which I use mostly on my phone though I also have Pandora and Spotify on the phone even though I don’t really know what Spotify is… And my phone has only so much storage so I can’t even have my entire iTunes, or what I want in my iTunes, on there. In the car it’s mostly public radio or music for the baby, occasionally a CD that stays in rotation for forever, or since I finally bought an auxiliary cable I can hook into my phone also, but that gets hard to navigate and drive at the same time. We also have a nifty home system like the one mentioned above, but iTunes crashes on that thing all the time and CDs have to be played on a different machine all together. I think I want a docking station that sits in the kitchen since iTunes won’t play nice with the home system, but???
So, I’m kinda in your boat. Frankly I listen to a lot less music now than I used to because it’s so inconvenient to find and play what I want right that moment. Sigh.
Hi! This is from a 25-year-old broke temp, so I’m guessing you might have a bit more leeway in what you can spend, but I’ve found it’s best to try to get everything synced up on the computer (unless yours is totally dead) and the phone (easiest if you have a Mac and an iPhone but really not too hard with a PC or an Android) that you have in digital format/on Spotify/Pandora. Just stay logged in on all your systems and you can bypass that stage.
If you already have a record player, I think it’s worth fixing up! Even if you have yourself nicely set up digitally/wirelessly, it’s still so nice to play a physical record with dinner or on a lazy morning.
I don’t have actual equipment recommendations as I kind of do bare minimum (see: broke), but I’d probably invest in a good set of small-ish portable speakers that can connect wirelessly to your phone or computer and potentially be plugged into the record player too. Also nice to have a little radio with a phone plug in the kitchen if space is tight there as it’s easy to just bring your phone in if you’re cooking and want to listen to whatever.
Hope this helps!
Colette, YES! Our budget is pretty darn tight too, but this is the exact starting point that I needed, thank you! 🙂