John Moe and those albums we listen to over and over
by John Moe
June 29, 2016
It was 1997 and I bought the CD for Ben Folds Five's Whatever and Ever Amen album and went right home, got through the many obstacles plastic presents on a CD, and listened to it. I felt the hooks place their hooks in me. When it was over, I listened to it again. Then a third time. I liked how this kind of reedy nasal voice blasted out to hold its own as a legit rock sound without losing its mournful and bookish quality. I not just liked but loved how at the center of this band was a piano. A piano! And I very much appreciated the fact that there were only three people in a band whose very name indicated five. I related to what he was saying and how he was saying it. This was my album.
I kept listening to it. And listened some more, over and over again. There were stories behind the songs if you looked really hard and were very patient with the 1997 internet. "Steven's Last Night in Town" was about a real guy named Steven who never seemed to leave town despite many promises to do so. At 2:55 in that song, you can hear a phone ring from a call that came in during a middle-of-the-night recording session in Folds' Chapel Hill, N.C., house. On "Cigarette", you can hear crickets outside. I listened for them by playing the album over and over. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of times. This went on for many months. At some point, listening to that album stopped being a pleasure and became more of a ritual. Something I did almost unconsciously every single day. It was no longer a process of discovery but rather one of getting to a functional mindset. I wouldn't go so far as calling it an addiction since it didn't interfere with my work or home life but I would call it a compulsion. I was drawn to that record.
Then one day, a great length of time later, I suddenly could not listen to it again. I could not bear to hear even a note of it any longer. It was like if a chain smoker instantly got sick at the sight of a cigarette. It wasn't that I was sick of it, really, but like I had moved through and past the presence of that particular music as a central part of life.
I didn't listen to Whatever and Ever Amen for years after that. When I finally returned to it, by then on iTunes and not on CD, I could listen and enjoy it as one entry in a larger catalog of albums. But every time I've heard it since the compulsive period, it's 1997 or early 1998 again and the listening can last only as long as I want to stay in my past. I'm in that apartment in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood. I'm going to work at that horrible job downtown and driving that beige Subaru. It was a time when I was really wondering what my place was in the world. I didn't know if the path I was on was a good one that I had willfully chosen or a bad one I had fallen into (it was the latter, I fixed it). That predicament feels like the lyrical sentiment and the musical tone of the very album I had got stuck on.
I asked on Twitter if other people had gone through a similar experience with particular albums where they listened to it constantly for a period of time and then suddenly could not listen to it again. The response was an overwhelming yes.
Whatever and Ever Amen was not my first or last experience with album compulsion/revulsion. I've had the same habit with several others that all seem to fit the same sub-genre of Sensitive Dude Working Through His Emotions:
Give Up - The Postal Service
Green - R.E.M.
Trouble Will Find Me - The National
Heartbreaker - Ryan Adams
Anodyne - Uncle Tupelo
Fight Songs - The Old 97's
I think what I did with Ben Folds, and what I've done before and since, was get locked into music that spoke to me on a deeper level than I could even articulate. And then I sort of hooked a rope onto that music and let it drag me to some level of understanding my situation. I was ultimately able to let go of these albums and hit that "no more listening" wall when my conscious awareness caught up to the music and could move along on its own or when my circumstances made the album, at last, less resonant to my life. I don't know if that's what other people went through but judging by what I've heard, there is some deep subconscious power that skates the line of magic going on there. I think that's what good art is.
At present, I am between compulsion albums. Either my soul is at peace or, more likely, I just haven't found that perfect match at the moment. It's out there. My ears and heart are waiting.
John Moe is heard every Wednesday on Oake & Riley in the Morning, commenting on the latest Internet trends. He also co-hosts the podcast Conversation Parade (with Open Mike Eagle) on the Infinite Guest network, and is an author of a number of books, including The Deleted Emails of Hilary Clinton: A Parody and Dear Luke, We Need To Talk, Darth: And Other Pop Culture Correspondences.
