Between the Cassette Tape '80s and the MP3 Aughts, I amassed scads of CDs that now languish in a cricket-infested basement. Not sure how many I have, but I guess I'll know these things by the end of this regimen.
By "this regimen," I mean the most recent exercise gimmick I've introduced to keep boredom at bay: Run/jog/walk/saunter/stretch/body-contort three to five days a week, each day to a different CD in this CD collection*, until I work my way through the entire stockpile.
I don't have very sophisticated musical tastes, but each CD did what it was supposed to do when I needed it to, and that counts for something.
Today's album: The Sign (Ace of Base)
Length: 46 minutes
Activity: Treadmill
What listening to this album made me think of: The Sign came out right after college graduation, when I had successfully nabbed my first** low-paying publishing job*** along Long Island's Route 110 corridor. Which meant I spent a lot of time blasting this album as I sped through the industrial park to happy hours along said sad corridor.
Nothing back then made me happier than a) post-college happy hours with other young people trying to cope with real-world non-happy hours, and b) sweet Swede reggae-pop (do not call it Eurotrash) blasting from the CD player the Saturn dealership threw in for free in my 1994 S-Series sedan, the first car I bought without adult supervision. It looked like this, without the pinstripe:
Listening to this made me think of that. And of the hours spent in the bedroom I still leased in my parents' house, armed with a cassette player and a Casio keyboard that allowed me to re-record a goodly cross-section of the Ace of Base discography. I mastered my mimicry of Linn Berggren's guttural sputterings—it's no small feat to growl "baby" like she does at 1:12 in "Wheel of Fortune" without blowing out your vocal cords—and didn't totally butcher Buddha and Joker's trancelike analog synths, the efforts of which I'd demo here if I were motivated to dig through my garage crates for that MIA shoebox of abandoned cassettes.
Hearing this CD again also reminded me of another Ace of Base song, "Whenever You're Near Me," which I first heard as its European counterpart, "Life Is a Flower," in June 1998 while gazing upon goats from my poolside perch on a Mykonos mountainside overlooking the Aegean:
My Cycladic Canaan, a.k.a. the San Marco Hotel
It was a hedonistic stay in remote digs, and "Life Is a Flower" transmitted from the hotel PA system and baked into my brain forever.
Review: No complaints.
How I felt after: I forgot I can't run the AC in my basement while running on the treadmill (both appliances simultaneously sucking up PSEG juice blows out the power in my house), so I sweated out any and all emotions, even the negative ones. I guess that means I felt pretty good.
It also made me laugh to think back on those Grecian goats, gnawing lazily on island dwarf scrub as they ogled with analytical, aloof eyes the bikini-ed ladies gnawing even more lazily on feta-topped potatoes, occasionally lifting their slender, tanned digits out of the chlorinated basin and into the arid mountain air to signal for some hooch.
Random fact I learned about this artist/album: Buddha (aka Ulf Gunnar Ekberg) was apparently mixed up in some neo-Nazi shit at some point.
* Full albums only; mix CDs I made don't count, though I'm sure I'll succumb to the temptation of nostalgia now and again.
** Yes, there were more.
*** What sort of publications of note does one find along the Route 110 corridor? Circa 1993-94, the B2B scriptures known as Mass Transit, Studio Photography, and Food and Beverage Marketing, among others.
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