about as shallow as it gets here, folks

I'm getting into the habit of listening to music again. What an odd thing to admit. But for so long, scanty storage and subpar stereos have made dealing with piles of cds a real hassle. I have been in a longstanding rut of defaulting to npr or occasionally streaming from pandora.com when I'm online. Now that I've got an under cabinet docking station for my ipod, I'm slowly importing my music collection (wee, by any standards) into itunes for convenient listening without the mess of dics. It's been nice having the music around more. Which is not to say it's quiet otherwise. We're a noisy little family.

And the more I listen to music in the kitchen, the more it occurs to me to listen other times, as well. (I told you this was an odd thing to admit). But I have to be careful. I'm too sensitive to music, I think, to let it in my head all the time. It's one thing to listen to it playing across the room and it's another thing all together to have it right up in my brain. How do I explain it? Here, here's a little paragraph I wrote about six months ago (am I really so lazy/uninspired in my writing to wade through old livejournal posts for one measly paragraph?):

I use my ipod mostly for listening to podcasts when I'm nursing the boy to sleep. A couple of times I did listen to music, but it was too powerful and I had to stop. Something about lying in the dark, with the music right up inside of me like that, it made me feel too vulnerable. It was like it transported me to adolescence, to the joy and hope I'd find in my walkman, the way music would create this unique, visceral response, the way it felt so specific and personal, the way it picked you up and held you, safely in the palm of drum beats and guitar chords, carelessly aloft with the whole, beautiful world around you. but now that joy and hope is juxtaposed with the heartbreak of being thirty-one and not all that much wiser. I wish I could explain myself better.

The only difference now is that I'm thirty-two, but I still can't explain it any better than that. It can be so perfect and beautiful, but there's a nostalgic discomfort in the beauty that compels my head to explode. What, you don't feel that way, too?

So, what am I listening to, anyway? Lots of stuff. I get really into one thing (one food, one pair of shoes, one humorous catch phrase) and I can listen to it (eat it, wear it, say it) a million times over before it even starts to get old. So if I tell you that my current favorite song is Mama Won't You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah don't scratch your head and think, but that's what she said months ago! I really can't get enough of this song. It's not a single and so I couldn't find a stellar video to share, but you can get the gist:

(hi, I'm april, sucker for harmonicas and jangly melodies and weird, long song titles)

I'm also appreciating the fairly new npr All Songs Considered concert podcasts, with free downloads of complete concerts. I can listen to hours of Iron & Wine while I'm cooking dinner or rock out to Rilo Kiley when I'm cleaning up the house. There's a bunch of great music there already and I think they're still adding more. I'm not so hip to new things and music, so maybe you know about those already.

Surely you already knew that ipods are compatible with wireless headphone technology. I had this brilliant epiphany the other night, when, yet again, my headphones were ripped off of my head and my ipod flew out of my pocket when the cord caught on one of the drawer pulls in the kitchen and I thought, and then said aloud to the husband, that somebody ought to invent headphones (and by headphones, I really mean headphones, I can't stand earbuds poking at my cartilage) without wires. And he chuckled heartily at my expense. Sometimes I'll write about other things I've inadvertently re-invented, but now I'm just mentioning my status as a technological neophyte. Which is probably why I find it worthy of my time to sit here and write about listening to music through headphones at all; what is current and interesting to me is old hat to everybody else. (or sometimes the other way around).