Going Analogue to Put Effort Back Into Everything

I fear that going analogue will become another whim for me, but I also hold a lot of home that it will become something more permanent in my life. 

    It was quite accidental that I started going analogue. In 2024 I was interested in getting a digi cam because it seemed like a fun novelty and a couple of my friends had them, but never ended up getting one myself. Funnily enough I still down own a digicam, but I am now in proud possession of a CD Walkman. 

    I started collecting CDs on accident too. It started with tracking down a CD of Billy Talent 3 for a friends birthday gift. He'd been collecting all their albums on CD with 2 missing, one of which was the album they released under the name they had before Billy Talent- which Stars no I'm not tracking that down its horribly rare- and the other was their 3rd album, aptly named Billy Talent 3. I took to Facebook Marketplace to search, and since I was doing this a week before my friend was planning on visiting, time was of the essence. I find someone selling the first three Billy Talent albums together and someone selling just Billy Talent 3, still in the plastic. Score! I send messages to both of them, and the one selling the collection gets back to me first. After a total of 80 minutes on the bus later, I get back from picking up the collection just to get a message back from the other seller. Well. Shit. It'll make a better gift, so another trip it is. I get a friend of a friend to drive me there to pick it up and now I've got the CD I was hoping to gift my friend, and 3 more that I've got no reason to give away, and I'm not really upset about it.

    I actually really like Billy Talent, the friend in question being the one who got me into them, and as a bit of a design and printing nerd, I was happy to own physical copies of the CDs to be able to look at the layout of the booklets and all of the printed parts of this physical media. However, I didn't own anything I could play them with, so they sat alone in my room as design ephemera until late last year. 

    Its October. Me and my best friend go to the official release party for the final release of the new Hayley Williams album. My best friends been keeping me up with all of the lore surrounding the album, and I'm invested. Of course, this release party is hosted by a record store, and I end that night with 2 albums in my hands. One of them was the Hayley Williams album in question, Ego Death at a Bachlorette Party because my best friend didn't realize that the complementary tote bag that was advertised with the event only came with a purchase of the album which my best friend wasn't interested in keeping, and the other being So Much (for) Stardust by Fall Out Boy. I'd gotten one hell of a hyper-fixation on Fall Out Boy that August (which is still going strong!) and Stardust was (and still is) one of my favourite albums of theirs. This then launched me into collecting the rest of the Fall Out Boy albums, and ending up with a couple other interesting ones along the way.  

    So of course, one cannot own CDs without any way to play them, so when my Facebook Marketplace gave me a listing for a good condition CD Walkman, I jumped on it. Owning CDs also got me into learning how to download them so I could listen to them on my phone, and further into learning how to pirate albums. 

ANYWAYS. This has been a very roundabout way to talk about the joy of going analogue and owning media. Streaming sucks and doesn't do shit for the artist. AI music is on Spotify and that's terrifying. There's a beauty to opening a CD case, looking through the booklet, looking at the graphics, and wondering what the though process behind it all was. Not all of it is traditionally beautiful graphic design, most of it is pretty subpar, with some really interesting horrible outliers, but regardless its something interesting to think about. Listening to music on my Walkman takes time. If I'm gonna take it out with me for a trip I need to choose which CDs I'm taking with me, consider how long my trip will be, how many CDs I'll get through, what mood I'm in that day. I need to finagle to skip a track, pausing being a just a little more inconvenient but not impossible. I have to take time to switch out the CDs, make a new choice that takes more effort than a click. There's something fun about the inconvenience, about living through the steps that were made to be skipped by the time I came to in this world. 

    I've been really enjoying finding CDs at thrift stores and giving them a chance. Just recently found out that I enjoy Cage the Elephant, or at least their second album, for the low cost of 2 dollars and tax. And sure I could've found this out for free, listened to them on a streaming site, but I don't think I would've ever gotten there in the first place. The choice to take that CD home with me, knowing it'll be entering my collection means I have to give it a try, I can't just ignore it on my shelf. I still find plenty of new music (as in new to me) online, but I'm really enjoying exploring the other routes of finding things. About letting things pop up naturally, about seeing where curiosity leads me. And especially by going to local shows and seeing whats being made. Stars I love live music. That's a different ramble though. 

 My favourite find of recent have been Demi Lovato's "HOLY FVCK". I've never really been a close follower of her career but goddamn that's a good time of an album.