From the Editor’s Desk: Music (Premium)

In Look What You Made Me Do (Premium), I described a previously unthinkable shift from a Sonos Beam soundbar to a pair of Apple HomePod speakers for our TV. It’s a long write-up for what some may think is a relatively unimportant product choice. But it was going to be much longer: This event hits on an incredible range of topics that are central to my personal and professional lives, and there’s so much more to discuss.

Untangling all that is difficult, but it occurred to me as I poured out the words in that article that this isn’t really about TV. It’s about music. It’s the reason I experimented with Sonos in the first place and then eventually went all in. Music isn’t logical, it’s emotional. It’s also personal, at least to me, one measure of the passage of time, and an important way I mark some of my life’s biggest milestones.

Music isn’t the only trigger for this sort of thing. Old photos trigger more precise memories in my brain. As do familiar smells. But there is something uniquely powerful about music. Just hearing the first few notes of a favorite song immediately sends my mind racing back to a specific place, time, and event.

This isn’t a secret. It’s not new information. But as my background discontent with a particular technology over many years bubbled to the surface in a series of coincidental events and then grew into a cacophony of noise and worry that I couldn’t ignore any longer, I suddenly realized there was something deeper underlying all this. I had spent so much time, effort, and money trying to solve problems with a set of products that were getting in my way instead of doing their freaking job. And that thing they were making more difficult to enjoy matters to me.

It’s always mattered.

I’ve loved music my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are about music. I remember my mother singing to me. Listening to my first album, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? by Mister Rogers, which was released in 1967, the year after I was born, and includes songs like I’d Like To Be Like Mom & Dad, Going To Marry Mom, and I Like You As You Are. My stepdad’s record collection, which was packed with influential music by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, and so many others.

That grounding was important. When I grew up, we all listened to music from our era, but also music from the previous decades. I didn’t distinguish between now and then, as I know my kids do: Good music is just good music. I feel like younger generations have lost that.

My first job was at a caterer in Roslindale, a suburban neighborhood in Boston that’s two towns over from Dedham, where I grew up. I was too young to drive, and my parents made it clear that I was on my own in that regard. So I would take the bus, which drove by my house, and passed the time by listening to the radio on a little Walkman. I’ve always had a mixed relationship with radio—it was the best way to discover new music, but I also preferred listening to specific music—so I would spend most of that time spinning the little dial between stations, trying to land on something good. (Key musical memory: Saved by Zero by The Fixx.)

That Walkman played had played a key role in an earlier maturity moment. My family spent two summers in Washington D.C. when I was a child/young teen because my stepdad worked for the government and needed to be there for training. On the second of those two summers, in the early 1980s, we were living in a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from D.C. And I was old enough that my parents let me walk across the Scott Key Bridge into Georgetown, and from there into D.C. I spent almost every day, walking across that bridge, and all over D.C., exploring, listening to music on the Walkman. (Key musical memories: Wanna Be Startin’ Something, by Michael Jackson, which sounded better than should have been possible at the time, and Photograph by Def Leppard, still my favorite band.)

I finally got a Sears stereo system with a record player, a radio, and two cassette tape decks for Christmas one year. It was a cheap thing, but it was mine, and something I could enjoy in my own space. I would record my own mix tapes using songs on albums, which at first were either borrowed from dad’s collection or gifts. The first album I ever bought with my own money was Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. I quickly built a music collection of LPs and 45 singles, and I still have all the tapes I made from the late 1980s on.

Those tapes were the soundtrack of my teen years. They were uniquely me, not just because I chose the music, but because I specifically paired songs because I felt they naturally followed each other. I added little audio clips, favorite quotes from favorite movies, between some songs. And as time went on, these became better, technically and aesthetically. By the time I got my first car, a 1972 VW Super Beetle, in 1985, I was ready with a collection of tapes, in a little faux leather briefcase that fit under the seat.

I bought that car in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and drove it back to Boston with a friend over a quick week that was a blur of vista views and music. Another friend upgraded its tired cassette player with a Blaupunkt in-dash unit and better speakers, and I was off. Literally: I used to just go for drives in the car to listen to music, or take the long way to and from places, just as that last friend and I had left for our last year of high school early each morning so we could do the same in his car.

The mid-1980s were all about driving and music. Driving around on weekend nights to see who was around. Skipping school to go into Boston and buy music. Driving to concerts—my first was Van Halen, on their 1984 tour—some in ever further-away venues. We saw Van Halen again in 1986, twice, and after the Providence, Rhode Island show, we discovered that my friend’s car was dead and wouldn’t start. After stepping through the various parental rescue possibilities, I called home from a pay phone, and my stepdad made the 45-minute drive, each way, to get us. He was upset, naturally, given the time and distance, and asked me why we had chosen to call him. I told him that it was because I knew he would understand. And that he had played such a major role in my love of music in the first place.

Speaking of which, the first album I bought exclusively on cassette, appropriately enough, was Van Halen’s 5150, and that album was in many ways the core soundtrack to the summer of 1986. This was the first time the notion of “the perfect album” came up between me and my friends—and 5150, while very good, was not perfect—but this was a fun debate that would be repeated through the years. Sitting on a friend’s front porch in the late 1970s, we had decided and agreed that Boston’s first album absolutely qualified for this list. That still feels right today. (Key musical memory: Vital Signs by Survivor.)

In the mid-1980s, I started flying alone for the first time, visiting my real father in Albuquerque, New Mexico during school vacations. For one trip, I borrowed a friend’s expensive and premium-feeling Sony Walkman cassette player, and I later bought my own, though I opted for the rugged and bright yellow version, with its waterproof rubber seals. Bliss. (Key musical memory: Taping over the tab on Vital Signs so I could record Van Halen’s Why Can’t This Be Love off the radio onto an unused portion of the tape.)

In 1987, I moved to my real father’s home in Albuquerque to go back to school, but I had to move back home the following January after our house burned down. It was almost a total loss, and our dog passed away, sadly. But the firemen rescued my father’s photo albums, which still amazes us all to this day. My belongings were not so lucky: I lost my Commodore 64 and many dozens of floppy disks, mostly games, but also my cassette tape collection. (Key musical memory: Hysteria by Def Leppard. My sister and I drove to the mall to buy the cassette, and we didn’t drive home until an hour later, when we had finished listening to it. Also, walking in a rare snow flurry on the UNM campus, listening to it for the umpteenth time.)

I started over.

And not just with music: I reconnected with Stephanie, who I had met at Toys R Us the winter before I moved to Albuquerque, and we started dating exclusively as soon as I got home. The next two years were a blur of driving and music. Me driving to and from work, still taking the long way, and listening to music. Me working part-time in the record store in the mall over a holiday season, ostensibly for some extra money, but really so I could rebuild my portable music collection more cheaply. And Stephanie and I switching off on weekends, taking turns driving the 60 minutes to and from our respective parents’ homes. (Key musical memory: Steve Winwood’s Roll With It album, which I oddly fell in love with that summer.)

Those drives are unforgettable, and it was all about the music. Steph and I would also go away on long weekend trips, sometimes to Cape Cod, sometimes to Maine or New Hampshire, but usually to Stowe, Vermont, where we got engaged in late 1998. She let me pick the music, as I spent so much time on it. But she had been a DJ with a friend in college and started influencing me with the alternative rock music—I thought of it at the time as “college rock”—that she preferred. (Key musical memory: My introduction to REM. Are you kidding me?)

This expansion of taste, or diversity of music types, is likewise important. The year my home burned down in Albuquerque, I worked at an incredible bookstore called Page One that also stocked electronics, software, and, perhaps most crucially, music CDs. This format was still new, at least to me, and seemed unsuitable for use in portable devices and cars. Page One played an exclusively instrumental mix of music during the days—much of it was so-called New Age music, which I grew to love—but it allowed the employees to pick the music and night and, better still, really crank it on the store’s incredible stereo system. So I got to know and love CD as a format, while expanding my tastes.

(Key musical memory: I jokingly dedicated the song Burning Down the House by The Talking Heads to, I don’t know, myself, I guess, one night after the incident, announcing it over the PA in the store. I had been working there the night the house burned down, so I guess this made sense at the time. I think it confused everyone there.)

I bought my first CD player in 1988 after returning home. My first CDs, purchased together, were Def Leppard’s Hysteria, of course, and another almost-perfect album, and a New Age CD called Desert Vision by David Lanz and Paul Speer that had clicked with me at Page One. I quickly built an even bigger audio CD collection that included both full-length albums and CD singles, a short-lived phenomenon. By the time the 80s ended, I was listening to—almost analyzing—1970s Yes albums on CD using huge over the ear “can” headphones, wired directly to my component receiver. (Key musical memory: In the early 1990s, almost everything Lanz’s record label, Narada, put out was fantastic. There’s a nice body of terrific instrumental music in there.)

When we got married in 1990, Stephanie and I moved into an apartment on the second floor of a house in Canton, next to Dedham, and my stereo—the receiver, the CD player that evolved into a five-disc CD changer, a component tape deck, and some decent (for the day and my budget) floor-standing speakers—came with us. We had friends who were also into music, and the four of us, sometimes two of us, would head into Boston for the midnight releases of new albums on CD, listening to them in the car on the way home. (Key musical memory: Love and Anger by Kate Bush.)

During this era, and through the end of the 20th century, buying music was almost communal. We would go to stores, not just looking for new music, but also going to the many used record and CD stores that were all over Boston and neighboring Cambridge, rifling through the racks, looking for something new. Our collection grew and grew. During the week, I’d drive into West Roxbury, another suburban Boston neighborhood, where I worked at a bank, listening to music. And each weekend, we’d listen to music together, with friends, on weekend getaways in the car, at concerts, whatever.

And things started changing. As I guess they always do.

Back then, music, TV, and video were different things. TV was just TV, and we had a 25-inch tube TV in the den, and an older 19-inch TV in the bedroom for some reason. But the component music system and our VHS VCR—we also had a growing collection of videotapes, including blanks we used to record TV shows—were interconnected. Briefly, wonderfully, stereo gave way to a five-speaker Bose sound system with tiny little speaker cubes on thin poles, plus a subwoofer. We could watch Star Wars in surround sound. (Key musical memory: I had purchased the soundtrack to the original Star Wars, a double album, during that second trip to D.C. in the early 1980s, and waited two months before I could play it for the first time when I got home.)

That didn’t last. We moved to Phoenix in 1993 and because we’d be moving around so much, we stored, sold, or gave away a lot of our stuff. The year we moved, we visited my real father, who was then living in London, for three or four weeks, and two of our friends came out for one of those weeks as well. That trip marked our first time in both Ireland and Paris. But it was also a time for buying CDs in London with our friends, CDs we couldn’t find back in the states, including many international releases from Japan and other places. The music stores there were humongous, like giant museums, and they had listening stations. It was incredible, a different era. (Key musical memory: An album no one has heard of, called Rain by the band of the same name, a sort of Irish rock band that never made it big in the states.)

Phoenix was another blur of music and time. By this point, we had a CD player in our car, and other friends of ours coincidentally moved to Tucson, one hour south. On many weekends, we’d drive there, or they’d come to Phoenix, and these trips were always bookmarked by music. CDs in the car on the drives, and trips to the incredible Bookmans in both cities, which among other things sold used and new CDs. (Key musical memory: REM’s Monster, which was on repeat in the car that summer, a perfect album.)

We also made new friends in Phoenix, and we’re still friends with two of them, though they’re now divorced. The husband literally just visited us in Mexico; he’s a life-long music fan like me, and we have divergent tastes, and so we spent a lot of time introducing each other to music that was, at the time, new to one or the other. One of our best moments of all time, perhaps the moment we truly bonded, came during a long weekend hike into Havasupai, Arizona. We spent most of that weekend coming up with band names, trying to stump the other, who would need to match them to a song. I somehow won in the end—he has a much broader knowledge of music than I do, honestly—when I blurted out “Toto Coelo.” Their big song was called I Eat Cannibals, a ridiculous effluent from the 1980s. And he had never heard of it.

Our son was born in 1998, and he sadly contracted bacterial meningitis a year later and almost died. But even that horrible memory is tied to music, Little Fighter by White Lion, which came on the radio when I was driving to the hospital in a still bizarre to me moment of serendipity. Mark pulled through, though he became deaf and got cochlear implants because of the illness. He doesn’t hear like we do, and one of the more minor of my many worries for him was that he would never enjoy music. But he does, and it’s a beautiful gift. He goes to concerts today as a young adult with his friends, and has since high school. Like I did.

We moved back to Boston in part because it was one of the best locations for the medical help Mark needed. And over the course of two homes in Dedham, of all places, we raised two kids, grew older, and kept listening to music. By this point, the digital revolution was underway, with music quickly evolving past physical formats into digital files and then streams. I used every imaginable music service, from the stolen music of Napster and Limewire to the purchased and DRM-protected iTunes era into our current era of Spotify, Apple Music, and other subscription services. Thanks to my job, I wrote about this, too, and a lot. Both online and in books.

This time was also a blur. How could it not be? We listened to music at home and in the car. Together, and with the kids. We introduced them to our music, and I made mix CDs and then playlists for them. They got older, found their own music, and got iPods and earphones, and listened alone.

There are so many memories. Too many.

Each summer, Steph would take the kids to the beach during the day for swimming lessons, and each Friday, I’d sign off early, drive there, cook dinner on the BBQ, and we’d close the beach, watching the sun set, and almost always the last people to leave. I’d drive home in my car—a 2000 VW New Beetle, appropriately enough—with the sunroof open and the windows down, and one of the kids in the back (the other in the van with mom. And we would play music, singing alone. The one song that stands out from me is Summer Sunshine by The Coors. Which was a perfect song for that time, and from a perfect album, too. (Key musical memory: The second song on that album, Angel, always reminds me of my daughter. Always.)

And that’s what music does, why it’s so important. It’s why I choke up briefly, slightly embarrassed even though I’m alone, as I think about that time and write those words. It’s why Sonos is so freaking offensive to me. And why getting that right is suddenly a priority. Just as it was when I bought the first Sonos speaker in 2015, and then a second to make a stereo pair in our living room. I would come home from a night out with friends on a weekend night, and if Stephanie wasn’t home yet from her own night out, I’d listen to music by myself. Then, she’d come back and join me. Music, together.

We continue this tradition to this day, though we’ve moved to a different state, have lived in three different homes, and bought a place in Mexico. Which needs its own way to play music. Music night is portable. But it’s not going to happen on its own.

All these years later, all the trips and moving and growing later, all these memories later, including the many more I’ve left out, in part because now this article has gotten too long, so much has changed. The music we’ve listened to has changed, has expanded, and it now includes a more diverse mix of songs that we both love, curated for the moment. And, as it turns out, in the moment. Stephanie loves it when the right song comes on, she’ll say it was “the perfect song for that moment,” and we seek out these things, suggesting songs and rearranging the playlist on the fly. In the moment, listening to music, together.

Looking back, it sometimes seems like music is the one constant in this history. The one thing that’s been there, always. Sometimes as a backdrop. Sometimes in the forefront, as when my daughter learned to play the guitar and performed live many times at local events while in high school. It’s the MSG of sound, an auditory umami that makes everything else better and more memorable. It’s mine, and it’s ours, and it’s yours. And it always will be.