Adrift

The calendar that so neatly defined our lives for so long has been shredded by the winds of change.

There’s no longer any need to save vacation days for November, first for the high school musical and then for the state football playoffs. We have no dog in either hunt anymore. Our son and our nephew are off at college.

The rhythms of fall disrupted. The basement gone silent.

Yeah, we’re still adjusting to being empty nesters. It’ll take a while.

To pass the time, I cleaned up AM, Then FM World Headquarters a few days ago. There are no more loose records on the floor in the office. Everything is in a crate or on a shelf. Everything is organized, mostly alphabetically, for the first time in a long time.

That’s progress, but now there’s no longer a stack of recent acquisitions, things that ought to be listened to first before going on the shelf. That was, and is, music to be shared. Yet those of us who read and write music blogs are finding increasingly few people to share it with. Another rhythm disrupted.

At a time of change, it’s still comforting to dig through those stacks. Some of those records have been there for 40 years. 

So, adrift? Yeah, perhaps for a while, but the music is still there. We’ll keep on keepin’ on.

“Keep On Doin’ What You Do,” Willie Hutch, from “Soul Portrait,” 1969. (The buy link is to a 2009 import.)

We’ll keep digging. After all, our fall record show is coming up in a couple of weeks. There must be more cool records like this.

Please visit our other blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.