Feeling Old

One of my favorite things to do is read liner notes. You know, those paper things they put inside real-live CD cases. I read them. See who played on them. Who produced the album. Who engineered. Guest musicians? Cameos? It's fun, because you realize stuff about your favorite records that you never knew. Unfortunately, in my case, tonight it was the year that was so surprising. Shocking and appalling, in fact

Conveniently enough for this story, I was pacing my baby to sleep while making this realization. I had her in an earth-momma wrap pacing through the dining room back-and-forth. Grabbing a sip of wine on one end, grabbing a CD at the other end (the office where I have my beshrined CD wall) where I would extract a CD, unsheathe its liner notes, read for a few paces, resheathe, recatalog, and select a new one.

While reading the notes to Mineral's "The Power of Failing", a record that truly changed my life, I realized that it was recorded mostly in the winter of my junior year in Highschool. January 1995. I didn't catch on to this record until 96 or early 97. But man, that's a long time ago. We're talking first girlfriend, driver's tests, community college.

Next, I picked up Starflyer 59's "Best Of" double disc entitled "Easy Come Easy Go". This band is one of my first loves. I think Scott Lehman bought me the cassette tape of "Silver" (their first album) back in the day, but I didn't realized that they were anthologized after 5 records and a slew of EPs with this Greatest Hits record in 2000. That's a long time ago!
(Fun side note: I acquired this record when my old band opened the release party show for this greatest hits album. We traded CDs with the band. A special memory for me that doesn't seem like 7 or 8 years ago.)

But here's what I'm getting at, folks. It's not just the years that have passed that are scaring me, it's what I read in the extensive liner notes in the Starflyer Best-Of album that got me down. A journalist basically wrote a 20 page biography of the band for this one. And in it, frontman Jason Martin is quoted speaking about one of the first records that changed HIS life. He says of The Smith's "The Queen is Dead", "I just could not handle how much I loved that thing."

And that's what got me. I've found records that I love in recent years. But not records that I "couldn't handle" loving. That feeling when you paradigm has shifted and a piece of art makes you feel like the rest of the world could never understand the way you feel. A piece of art like that is cruel and sweet at the same time. I don't have that feeling anymore. And I probably listen to better records now. But I don't feel that way anymore.

And I know I'm not that old, but damn that makes me feel old.

I guess the beautiful side to that is that I get to have that feeling about my wife and my daughter. Learning new things about them, learning about them, loving them makes me feel that way- better even. Writing music makes me feel that way, to an extent. Sometimes work does.

Fittingly, here's the chorus of a Starflyer 59 song called "I Drive A Lot":

"And when I get worked up I think of friends now 35."

Think of me, Jason. I'm getting there.