Nightsongs
This email was going to be about the band Stars.
It was going to be about how I discovered Stars and then downloaded a bunch of their songs on Limewire (some of which having turned out not to be Stars songs after all, which of course is part of the authentic Limewire experience).
It was going to be about how I then found Stars on Grooveshark, and marvelled at how what I thought were my versions of the albums were mere shadows (tracks missing, tracks out of order, tracks of poor quality — again, all part of the authentic Limewire experience).
It was going to be about how I remember rediscovering Stars in college on The Hype Machine — a new single for a new album and neither of which were that good but it got me listening to them again, got me digging out an old hard drive from an old laptop with music that suddenly seemed poignant, the dust a patina.
It was going to be about how I still listen to Stars, and how annoyed I am that their debut album (Nightsongs, which is terrific but in a different way, more of a hip, earnest take on The Smiths than the full baroque thing they settled into) got pulled off of Spotify, and now if I have to listen to it I need to launch Apple Music and, honestly, who wants to launch Apple Music?
It was going to be about how I don’t really buy most of the doomsday arguments against Spotify, or against streaming culture in general — that it kills discovery, that it turns music from an experience into a thing you listen to in the background, that it turns it into a commodity. But sometimes you catch yourself feeling too lazy to launch an app to listen to an album you love and you wonder what product design decisions were made along the way to turn you into that person.
However, it’s not about those things. I made the terrific decision of googling “LimeWire” screenshot and it sent me down a trip down memory lane of all of these perfect and awful things I used to listen to music. And now they’re all I can think about.
There are others I could include — the old Sony MP3 player that could hold a dozen songs that I got as a hand me down from my brother, the original iPod Video (I was too late to the scene [and too poor] to get anything older than that.). Dreamhost pages with embedded MIDIs; the arcane power of ripping a CD.
Now I have Spotify running through all devices: on my laptop, on my phone, on my Sonos speakers. And its capable, and polished, and holds millions of songs: but I can’t imagine myself rediscovering a screenshot of it a decade later and marveling at what used to be.
Happy Sunday
I hope you rediscover an old favorite album.