Back in the spring, a good friend asked if I wanted to be part of a group that would listen to two albums each month — one of them randomly selected from Rolling Stone’s “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time“ list and the other picked by a group member. Then we’d talk about them during a Zoom call. Kind of like a record listening party. I said, “Why not?”
I ended up in a group of men, all great guys, who frankly have a much more impressive listening repertoire and expansive knowledge of music than my own. Over the years, they’ve all had their hand in the scene in some formal way, either by making music, writing about it or producing professional designs based on it. Was I intimidated? Of course. Did I kind of bluff my way through at first? You bet.
But it’s been a wonderful experience. The conversations are always enlightening, and without fail, we give respectful consideration to what each person has to say. For my first pick, I chose Sufjan Stevens’ “Carrie & Lowell,” a beautifully rendered album about grief and the mythmaking that happens in families. The gentle-souled album, though, carries a very strong charge for me because I listened to it while my parents were still alive and struggling with failing health. It helped me feel things that I had compartmentalized into numbness. When I shared the complicated emotional landscape that I brought to the songs, the rest of the group listened quietly and thoughtfully. It was like a purging for me.
