The Sound of Silence

 

I’m typing this without music in the background. And it’s a little bit eerie The reason for the silence is that Spotify up and eliminated my “Unlimited” tier, which I’ve had for the last ten years – ever since Spotify arrived in the US. For $5 a month I enjoyed the full Spotify, except for being able to use it on mobile devices. Not that my smartphones never had the bandwidth for it anyway -- when I have it on. Now I either have to pony up an extra $5 a month or put up with ads on the free tier. With 2 minutes of ads every 10 minutes, the free tier is a non-starter. And that extra $60 a year… well, we’ll see. I may get used to silence.

Still, silence is a big change for me. For the last twenty years and more, I’ve listened to music whenever I was painting, writing, or working at my desk using my Tivoli Audio Model Two as speakers. Back in the waning days of the last century, I stayed up late on the weekends to record three hours of Jazz With Bob Parlocha, a mainstream jazz radio show broadcasted by our state’s public radio network. I converted each hour into a mp3 track and burned those shows onto a CD. I ended up with a hundred disks of about 10 hours each so I could listen to them when I was fully awake and painting.

That changed when the online music service Lala became available and I signed up for it. With Lala I was able to listen to every tune once for free. Then, if I wanted to add it to my streaming library I paid a dime per tune. If you wanted to buy it, it was the usual $.99. Listening to Lala introduced me to a wide variety of  music genres, expanding my taste in music far beyond jazz. In the few years it was available, I acquired a small streaming library which I recorded using my handy-dandy iRiver mp3 player. Luckily, I still have those tunes, so if silence gets too eerie, I can turn back time a decade or so to my Lala days. Apple bought up and closed down Lala, and I haven’t forgiven them for that.

Ten years ago, Spotify became available in the US and I signed up immediately. All my books have been written with Spotify playing in the background. I continued to explore many facets of music, while avoiding others, like country, rap, and most classical music.

The strange thing about all this is that I’m not an audio-focused person. I can’t just sit and enjoy music as audiophiles can. Music doesn’t hold my attention. My wife will often remark about something that she hears – a dog barking, a bird singing – that I no doubt heard, but it never registered with me. And for the most part, this is also true of the music I listened to when I’m writing at my desk. Oh, sometime I’d pause and listen to it – but much of the time it goes in one ear and out the other without leaving a trace. Indeed, I have a whole playlist – called “Favorites” – of songs that actually caught my attention when I was working -- songs that for some reason resonated with me. Nevertheless, I have collected many days worth of songs in different playlists – soundtracks, piano music, some European jazz, and semi/modern compositions, that I enjoy, but yet, will mostly drift by without me consciously noting them.

And yet, I can feel its absence as I write this piece, so music must do something. I want my full range of music back. But I’m willing to hold out until I get some incentive to began paying Spotify again for it. What makes this decision a bit easier is that I’m not actually writing fiction at the moment. My Molly, Mons, and Mars story is on hold, though I'm planning to start a new Nine Star Nebula mystery/adventure story on 1 Nov -- and unofficial NaNoWriMo effort. We'll see how it goes. In any event, these weekly blog posts  have been about my only exercise in writing all summer. Still, I guess I can slouch on until Spotify becomes desperate enough to get me back and offers me a deal I can’t refuse.

In the meanwhile, I will just revisit my old music, all those Lala tunes, and if I can find a CD player that works, all those Jazz with Bob Parlocha tunes as well.

By the way, if you have Spotify and are curious to know the music behind my stories, you can find some of the playlists that I made public on my profile – charleslit is my user name. Many of the playlists are just collections of songs or albums that I don’t want to lose track of – they are not artistically arranged.