Timeless Origins

Hg: not your favourite albums, but your most enduring ones
Hg: stuff that still means a lot to you, today
Hg: not for nostalgia value
Hg: stuff that maybe you didn’t realise how much you liked, but you found yourself dragging it out repeatedly
Hg: maybe you don’t even like much of the artist’s work
Hg: not nostalgia, the stuff i’m aiming for is the stuff that you still want to listen to now
Hg: timeless, i suppose
Hg: not regularly, as in once a month or once a year even
Hg: but you have to keep coming back to them, even if you thought you never would
Hg: recurrence is important
Hg: surprise at this recurrence is interesting too
Hg: i was thinking that sometimes it’s depth of emotion, that it can satisfy you on many levels as you grow & change
Hg: and also in some cases it’s precise and self-contained so you appreciate it like a work of art without having any real attachment to it
Hg: if you have no attachment to it, if it doesn’t remind you of the guy/girl who broke your heart, you continue enjoying & appreciating it
Hg: not necessarily something you play all the time, but something you keep going back to over the years
Hg: even with a little surprise, as though you didn’t expect to like it this much
Hg: its longevity wasn’t apparent when you first bought it
Hg: maybe you don’t even like a lot of the artist’s other stuff
More to follow…

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13 Responses to Timeless Origins

  1. Caroline says:

    Sounds familiar.

  2. Stuart says:

    Heh. For the record (argh!), I don’t habitually log instant messenger conversations. In these three particular cases, I copied what I had written to remind me when I came to write the full post.
    Still not having written it several weeks later, I thought posting my working notes might spur me into creativity. However, going for a swim seems more attractive right now, so it can wait.

  3. Vaughan says:

    ditto . . . me too. For the past week, I’ve been rediscovering an old cassette of Cleopatra Grip by The Heart Throbs. Blimey.

  4. Stuart says:

    Honestly, you lot… I try to be all enigmatic and cryptic and there you all are: “It was me! It was me!”
    And only a couple of hours ago I was thinking “well at least Vaughan didn’t complete the trio…” :-)
    Still nowhere near writing it, but at least I’ve just finished my final MT migration task (decent formatting for individual entry archives, seeing as you asked).

  5. e says:

    I remember asking you this before, but as you know my memory is pretty bad as is (and getting worse), so Ill just ask again… Which IM thingie was the one that uses port 80 again?
    Guess who’s not in charge of the firewall? ;)

  6. Stuart says:

    e – I hear that AIM will automatically switch to port 80 if it can’t connect via its regular ports. Never tested this, but a quick Google search reveals it to be well-documented. Alternatively you could use the Java-based Aim Express client, available at http://www.aol.co.uk/aim/aimexpress/.

  7. mike says:

    Since you ask!
    I’m taking 1996 as my cut-off point. Surprised at how many I came up with; maybe I’m not as fickle as I thought. Anyhow, these all fit your criteria.
    miles davis – sketches of spain
    rolling stones – let it bleed
    kevin ayers – joy of a toy
    yes – close to the edge
    roxy music – stranded
    genesis – selling england by the pound
    john martyn – solid air
    kevin ayers – bananamour
    joni mitchell – blue
    leonard cohen – i’m your man
    stone roses – stone roses
    massive attack – blue lines
    ultramarine – every man and woman is a star
    neil young – harvest moon
    nanci griffith – other voices, other rooms
    various – cafe del mar volumen dos
    ali farka toure & ry cooder – talking timbuktu
    orbital – the “brown” album
    madonna – bedtime stories
    george michael – older
    maxwell – maxwell’s urban hang suite
    leftfield – leftism
    various (mixed by blu peter) – reactivate 10: snappy cracklepop techno

  8. Stuart says:

    Bloody hell, I’ve not even written the actual post yet!
    Interesting that you appear to have spontaneously chosen 1996 as a cut-off point (I’ve re-read the messenger thing and I don’t see any reference to it, or even a hint) because my full (draft) post gives “must be more than five years old” as one of its criteria.
    OK, I give in. I will actually finish writing it now.

  9. mike says:

    In the middle of tonight’s Mudhoney gig (briliant at the beginning and the end, but it sagged in the middle), I suddenly remembered a couple of major omissions:
    marvin gaye – what’s going on
    stevie wonder – innervisions
    Sometimes, the albums which keep popping up in tediously self-important lists of “Classics” really are just that: timeless classics.

  10. Caroline says:

    Mike is scaring me with the number of records that would be on my list as well.

  11. Caroline says:

    Sorry, not that many after all. Three seems a lot, though.

  12. sue says:

    i’m feeling very nostalgic for things I listened to in my early 20s….so this list is heavily weighted to that time period. Without leaving the computer to go look at my record collection, here it goes….no particular order. Sticking with the nothing after 1996 (at least I think I did that…)
    Gavin Friday ‘Each Man Kills…’
    Bryan Ferry ‘These Foolish Things’
    Lou Reed/John Cale ‘Songs for Drella’
    Throwing Muses ‘Throwing Muses’
    Joy Division ‘Unknown Pleasures’
    Nick Cave ‘Henry’s Dream’
    Minutemen ‘Double Nickels on the Dime’
    Husker Du ‘Warehouse: Songs & Stories’
    Meat Puppets ‘Up on the Sun’
    most random: Michael Jackson ‘Off the Wall’
    more to follow…