It’s been one of the rites of passage of cohabitating couplehood (married or not) for a few decades – the combining of music collections. The media may be different now – cassettes replaced records, then CDs came along, and now most of it’s probably digital – but couples still learn a lot about each other through perusing each other’s musical tastes, and eventually merging them (or choosing not to, which is telling in itself). It’s an interesting process: finding out just how many duplicates have to be weeded out, how many gaps in each other’s collections they can fill, and what provokes “I can’t believe you actually own that!/Don’t judge me!” responses. It can be more revealing, and more exposing, than sharing preferences in other areas, since music is often so closely associated with our memories and emotions, and it was actually one of more nervous-making experiences in my relationship with Tall Paul because of that.
My husband and I haven’t mixed our physical CD collections. Both of us had been transferring our music to computers; his CDs have stayed in boxes since he ripped everything he wanted into iTunes, and mine haven’t been unpacked from whatever containers they were in when we moved in together. We did set up a shared iTunes library on his computer, though, which was only slightly complicated by the fact we’re a mixed marriage (he’s a Mac, I’m a PC), and we both create playlists without paying attention to who added what tracks to the library. I tend to seek out new music more than he does, so most recent-vintage additions to the library tend to be from me, but it’s turned out that he’s liked at least some of them. He leans more heavily “classic rock” in some respects than I do, although we had some overlap in our collections there and many of the same “likes;” we both contributed Beatles tracks to the collection, but all the Pink Floyd comes from him. I have a weakness for power pop that I’m not sure he quite gets. (EDITED 7/12 – Yeah, he does, actually, so I promised him I’d change that part.) We’re both still very attached to our high-school and college-era music (late 70’s/early 80’s pop-rock and New Wave, the “early MTV” years).
He still has a pre-video iPod; we bought my 30GB version last year to provide the music for our wedding and reception last fall (combined with the iPod HiFi, and I have to say it worked out great!), and I take it with me everywhere I can. For my last birthday I asked for a car adapter for it, and I got the kind that transmits through your radio on an FM frequency; we have so many radio signals floating around in the L.A. area that it’s fairly useless in some places, but it’s still better than not having it in the car at all. (Tall Paul has an adapter for his car that goes into his cassette deck, and it’s better than mine because it doesn’t use radio, but since my car came with a CD player instead of cassette it’s not an option for me.)
One day a few weeks ago, I accidentally started my iPod off playing all of the music on it instead of a specific playlist, but I’ve found I really like how that turns out. I have playlists created by both of us on the iPod, and the total track count is currently at 3215 when it draws from all of those, so I never know what will come up. We’ve both built our “eclectic” playlists from the merged library, with titles like “Channel F” (mine), “KPSV” (his), and “Happy Music;” we have “smart” playlists of music just from soundtrack compilations and everything we’ve both purchased from iTunes; and there are some genre playlists like “country” (I made that one before our trip to Tennessee) and “Parrothead” (Tall Paul puts Jimmy Buffett in a class by himself).
The fact that I’m wandering down this path today is all Bruce Springsteen and “Rosalita’s” fault. (For the record, both of us contributed music from “The Boss” to the library, but I think I came in with more, and neither of us had that particular song before even though we’ve both loved it for years.) Cranking the song up on my iPod on my way to work this morning, and listening to the storyteller begging his girlfriend Rosalita to defy her parents and “come out tonight” made me realize that I’m taking in the song on two levels, and I’m relating more to Rosalita’s parents at this point in my life. My husband has an about-to-be teenage daughter, and I have no problem picturing him “lower(ing) the boom” and “lock(ing) (her) in (her) room” to keep her away from a boy he doesn’t like or think is worthy, even though somewhere inside he’s still that boy himself – which is probably why he’d be reacting that way in the first place. It is a different view from the other side of 40, and after awhile it’s the kids’ turn to be the kids.
But we get to decide what kind of adults we’re going to be, and we get to refine and re-define that as we go along. I guess if you’re going to accept that you never have to outgrow rock-and-roll – and thank heavens for that! – you have to understand that you may still come to approach it differently, and while it’s OK, that part can be a bit of a shock. Staying connected to music we’ve loved helps us get back to who we were then, and reclaim parts of ourselves we’d like to hold on to and maybe haven’t quite been able to, without actually having to go back and relive being fourteen, or nineteen, or twenty-six, or whatever. But if what we go back to doesn’t really have a place in who and where we are now, it won’t stick, and maybe it’s not supposed to, since there’s always something new to learn and explore, and suitable music to accompany it.
