The CD player was on a makeshift table, next to a door leading to the small balcony of my equally small apartment. It was summer, or maybe spring, but warm, almost hot. The player was new and a splurge for me at the time, but I didn’t care—Compact Discs were the new frontier, full of wild promises of impossible sound. They came in wasteful, oversized packaging back then too, as if trying to apologize for a lack of weight and presence. It’s funny, isn’t it? Music is nothing but fog now but we don’t even blink. Substance is almost quaint.

I put on my standard-issue, black, over-the-ear headphones, plugged-in the long coiled cable into the 1/4 inch jack and stepped out on the balcony like I was entering a spaceship. I dropped a couple of cushions, closed my eyes and lied down, the sun bright enough to still burn through my eyelids, painting those big lazy dots of colour and making them dance. As I settled I heard the first notes of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. I heard the scraping of chairs and the brush of pages turning during softer passages, and I thought wow, this really is a miracle.

...

I used to dream of an infinite jukebox, but now I never know what to play. I either hit shuffle on someone else’s playlist, or fall back to the same albums I’ve heard ten million times before. Discovery is rarely more than a few songs deep because the investment isn’t there. I didn’t wander through a record store’s aisles, flipping through row after row of alphabetized artists; I didn’t weigh the pros and cons of one album over another, hesitating, then changing my mind at the very last minute. There was no anticipation on a bus trip home. I just open Apple Music and it’s all there: every song I ever owned, every album I ever wished for, along with everything else. The entire musical world on a plate.

And yet I remember it perfectly, that moment on the balcony with the sun in my eyes. How happy I felt.

How very simply happy I felt.

P.S RE the opening shot: it’s from an exhibition (link below). I’m just in complete awe of that image.