A nostalgic music post w/ nary a faith angle

When it comes to technology, I've always been a bit of a late adopter. (Did I mention that I recently started one of those crazy new BLOGS?) But as a music nut and stereotypically male obsessive list-maker, I was thrilled with the computer-based-music-collection thing and got in relatively (not extremely) early. It was just like always for people like me, except instead of a database file with a numerical code referenced to a CD on a huge shelf (yes, really), you could just CLICK ON THE SONG AND IT PLAYED. Incredible.

Anyway, whenever I take a road trip, I end up listening to CDs instead of mp3s. The byproduct of this is that I end up listening to older music, from back when I used to buy CDs--making a drive halfway across the country in a rented minivan full of everything I own to begin a new chapter of my life also function as a trip down memory lane. It's hard to drive safely through the tears...

Anyway, while I fear turning into the nostalgic-for-the-music-of-my-youth type that people pushing 30 tend to start turning into, I sure enjoyed the music during my move last week. A couple highlights:

Vigilantes of Love. Used to be one of my very favorite bands. Influenced my early songwriting, in which I tended to cram in an awful lot of dense ideas and hundreds of (often multisyllabic) words. I listened to their two least country/folk, most hard-rocking albums--the early, polished, hotshot-band Welcome to Struggleville and the middle-period, shoestring-budget-scrappy Slow, Dark Train. My two favorites--each is dark and brooding, each is clever, each features a reference to Salome's weight problem in the first track (!). I've since burned out on long-form confessional songwriting, but these albums still sound great.

U2. I've always been ambivalent to their wider catalog, but I love the 90s stuff, in which they're more playful and less anthemic, in terms of both production and lyrics (more silly wordplay, less political browbeating--have you heard that Bono's an activist, too?). Anyway, I rocked Achtung Baby and sang along w/ every word in order to stay awake from Chicago to Wisconsin.

The Innocence Mission. An enduring favorite, possibly my favorite band by now. But the older, more upbeat stuff still holds up well, too--sounds like the Sundays, but better.

Tom Waits. Hardly a timepiece and still my very favorite songwriter. Most Waits fans seem to fall into one of a few categories:

• "Closing Time is so tender and wonderful; why did he have to get so weird and start singing like Howlin' Wolf instead of Springsteen?"
• "Mule Variations is the best album of any kind in history."
  
• "All of the albums are wonderful, even the loungey 70s stuff and especially the angular 80s stuff. Mule Variations is fine, but its partisans are lightweights and dabblers."

I've alternated between the second and third options over the years. But I'm also among a minority of folks who think that Alice and Blood Money--the two very different albums he released on the same day in 2002 and two of the last CDs I ever bought--are as good as anything he's ever done. One is gorgeous and lush; the other dark and sinister. Both channel his jazz interests into something not loungey but chamber-ish and his circus fascination into something quieter than the old carnival-barker stuff he used to do. Great arrangements and some really astonishing songs.

For the second leg of the trip--from SE Wisconsin to St. Paul--I didn't have a CD player. So I listened to a lot of Wisconsin Public Radio, with its endless local talk shows and their socially-conservative-economically-moderate callers in, and I welcomed the familiar accents. But I missed the rock.