🎵 Rediscovering the joy of the album – Rian’s B-sides

Rian van der Merwe:

But in listening to it front to back several times, and not giving myself the option to skip whenever I got a little bored, I discovered depth and meaning in the songs I didn’t feel when I first listened to it. You see, songs take time. They take time to write, they take time to arrange, they take time to produce and record and mix and master. And when we treat those songs with the respect they deserve, something weird happens. We start to understand them. And like them. And make them part of us.

Easy, immediate access to any song ever recorded using just a tap or a voice command is pretty great, but I’m with Rian in that we’ve lost something because of it. One of the reasons I like vinyl is that I’m forced to live with new music for a while. I’m usually too lazy to put a different record on so I just listen to the same one over and over. I spend more time with a record, and thus feel like I become more connected with the music somehow.