Packing Boxes

Author: DC

Word count: 820

March 2011

Three weeks ago my fiancée and I finally managed to buy what will be our first house together, once we decorate it and move out of our current rented apartments. I’m moving in first, with the lady following several weeks later, and my date to leave the tiny one-bedroom place that has been my home for the last two and a half years is rapidly approaching. Given that, I’ve been doing all the usual things that we’ve all had to take care of when moving – packing boxes, finding utilities suppliers, working out where in my new house my life-sized plush cuddly sheep is going to live. The important things, you might say.

Last weekend, I had a 24 hour blitz, trying to do as many move-related things as I could in a day, so that it wouldn’t eat up all of my evenings during the next week or so. There turned out to be one recurring theme that dominated that 24 hours: it quickly became clearly, visibly, and possibly scarily apparent just how major a part music has come to play in my life. During that day I took down record sleeves hung from my kitchen walls, rang people to change the delivery addresses for my Rolling Stone, NME and Alternative Press subscriptions, boxed hundreds of CDs and vinyl records, unplugged speaker systems and record players, backed up the iTunes library on my computer to avoid move-related music loss, put some signed concert posters into tubes, donated to charity a Phil Collins record that my friend Dusty had ‘hilariously’ bought me as a birthday present, filled bags with band t-shirts and took down from shelves concert DVDs and Behind The Music documentaries. I ordered the shelves that will be the new home for those CDs and DVDs, I planned to have the posters professionally framed, and I tried to work out whether I could buy some replacement, more powerful speakers without annoying our new downstairs neighbours.

All in all, I realised that music has come to dominate not only what I listed to but what I read, what I watched, what I decorate my house with, what I allocate space to, what I wear, and what I annoy my fiancée with. This left me thinking, and by now I’ve identified a number of possible things that this music overload could mean. Option One: I’m one of those people who are going to end up on a TV show called something like “Hoarders: Extreme Tales of People Who Have Died of Asphyxiation While Buried Under Piles of Accumulated Junk”, or “Stories Of My Divorce: The Husband Who Loved Vinyl More Than Me”. If that turns out to be true, please address all letters to my rehab centre, and don’t give me money to buy magazines with, it will only feed the habit.

I don’t think I’m quite in Discovery Channel territory yet, though, for one simple reason. So many of the emails that I’ve received from you, readers and commenters and friends, during the last few years suggest that many of you have a similar level of immersion in all things musical as I do. Sure, we all have different tastes and preferred formats, but it seems that the vast majority of people reading this column don’t just have a casual, transactional, “something to listen to on the metro on the way to work in the mornings” relationship to music. Which led me to Option Two: that for a certain kind of person, music becomes something much bigger than a soundtrack. It becomes something much bigger, oddly, than music, than that song you put on when you get home from work in the evening. Instead it grows, it shoots tentacles through many different aspects of our lives, and in doing so it becomes both a part of us and something else as well, something external.

Music, when you love it this much and are this interested in it, actually becomes a character in your life. It takes your time – time spent reading music magazines or searching for downloads or fixing the names in your iTunes. It can’t be neglected, as you wouldn’t want to miss the new song by your favorite artist. It can’t be put in a corner when you consume too much and become sick of it, as it’s on your walls and your clothes. It’s a part of who you are, and it’s part of what you have to do every day and what you see. And this may be where I cross the line back into Option One territory, but for the last week it has felt like music is a third person moving into my new apartment, putting its stamp and its personality on our space. I don’t love it as much as my lady or in the same way, but I adore it, and I have a feeling that many of you feel