Somehow the 2014 movie version slipped under my radar. Stressful couple of years. And then it popped up on Netflix. I showed the first song to Maxine on Friday night. 1 She begged to watch a little bit more, and since it was Friday, I said yes. Soon Quinten joined us, and we ended up watching the first hour and a quarter of this two-hour movie. 2
That put them to bed after 11:30, but again, it was Friday night. One of my favorite childhood memories was being allowed to stay up late when something cool was on t.v. And they still whined about not being able to watch the last 45 minutes, so I got to be the terrible daddy, one of my favorite roles.
The next day we watched the rest of the movie, and Maxine asked to have the soundtrack on her USB drive. 3 So I dug through my files, but I couldn't find it.
This was frustrating, as I'm sure I've listened to that music sometime in the past 18 years. I know the CD is in a box in my parents' basement, and I know I listened to that CD many times, but I'm also sure that I ripped it at one point and had it on my computer. How could I not have done so?
So there is a memory gap. I'm not sure whether it is a gap in mine or that of the computer.
I started ripping my music into MP3s in the early 2000s. I had no idea what I was doing, and made some of them at very low sampling rates, like 56 kbps. (Sorry, that means that it sounded like a song your record off the radio from a station that isn't coming in very clearly. Not with static exactly, but not nearly as good as it could be.) I was mostly concerned with storage space, since I had hundreds of CDs and digital memory was just pulling into the burnable CD stage.
Once I figured out my mistake, I immediately sifted through the thousands of songs I had ripped and deleted the ones with low bitrates. I then ripped their respective CDs again at very high bitrates, anticipating a time when computer drives and external memory would be large and cheap.
Just kidding. I did nothing. I didn't even realize the mistake until years later, when I started listening on higher quality speakers and headphones, and wanted to carry around thousands of songs on my phone. But fixing that mistake would have taken time and effort, and I am nothing if not lazy.
I have steadily added to that collection of digital music over the years, but there has also been a trickle of songs disappearing 4, sometimes entire albums. One of the first I noticed was from "Pictures at an Exhibition," a gorgeous tone poem tour of an art museum. It has four tracks labeled "Promenade" (which I believe represent walking through the museum, little interludes between the drama of the paintings). But my computer at some point didn't like the idea of having multiple tracks with the same name. It most likely asked me what to do about it, and I told it to not bother copying tracks with the same name, because that would take up space.
Another space-saving habit I had was not keeping copies of tracks that appeared on other albums. So I have many "Best of" and "Greatest Hits" albums with little gaps where I thought I would save 67 megabytes and avoid hearing the same song too often on random play. To be fair, that's about 1.5% of a CD rom, so it would have made room for a few more songs. But I ended up with incomplete albums, and if I had listened to the original CDs enough, I noticed those gaps.
Once I figured out that mistake, I immediately made copies of the missing songs, changed their i.d. tags, and made my collection more complete.
Just kidding again. I did nothing. Because it would take time and effort, and I'm lazy, and it was a minor annoyance.
I have found entire albums 5 missing. One I found recently that I had on my phone, but not my computer. Of course, as soon as I figured that out I copied it from my phone to my...
Yeah, kidding again. I did nothing. I'm not even sure what album it was.
So here is my plan: the next time I am visiting America, I will sit down with the four thousand or so CDs in my parents basement and start ripping them into FLAC files. This is a lossless format that is supposed to sound exactly the same as what is on the CD, and takes up a correspondingly large amount of space. But you can buy external drives that are measured in terabytes, so this is actually doable.
Just kidding. I'm not going to do that! I will be in America! The last thing I want to do is park in front of a computer for hours at a time! 6
So maybe "Into The Woods" followed the missing album path that has been traversed by so many albums before it.
Unless it didn't.
I am now wondering if maybe ITW did not escape my college romance breakup completely unscathed. I am wondering if maybe I never listened to it again starting the semester I spent listening to sad music and not doing homework in reaction to being dumped by the first girl I had ever fallen in love with. 7
It is a distasteful memory that I don't like replaying for myself, much less for you, but it's been 18 years. It's time to look back.
As I was watching the movie with my kids, and listening to the music again over the next few days, it felt familiar, but I couldn't sing along with more than a line or two from any song. And if you know Sondheim, you know how easy it is to sing along. Quinten has been singing a few lines over the past couple of weeks, and he heard it only once!
For me, the music is coming back, but not like songs that I once knew by heart. The Wolf's song, "Hello, Little Girl," is very memorable. The rhymes are delicious, and the double entendre/innuendo is enough to make me a bit uncomfortable in front of my kids, but not obvious enough to make me turn it off. In other words, perfect for 20-year-old me through 35-year-old me. I should have listened to this song, and the rest of the album, enough times to have big portions of it down pat.
Did I dump this album after I got dumped? Did I leave it in a box in America and pretend it never existed because of the negative associations with the K breakup?
Honestly, I don't know. I was journaling a little back then, but it would never have gotten to that level of detail. I probably wouldn't have mentioned anything to do with being dumped other than how much it sucked. I can't even check because those journals are sitting in a box next to the boxes of CDs in my parents' basement.
I am considering having them all digitized, though. It will take me a while to get through them and redact them for publication on the Roblog, but it shouldn't take more than...
You got me. I'm never going to do that.
One of my favorite podcasts is Revisionist History, by Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, The Tipping Point, and others. I recently listened to an episode called "A Polite Word for Liar (Memory Part 1)" (You can listen to it at that link, which I highly recommend.) He presented some very convincing evidence to show that memory is extremely unreliable, even when we do our best to be objective. To put it simply, the brain is made of subjective, coated with a thin layer of trying-to-be-objective.
And it occurs to me that I could have very deliberately dropped ITW from my playlists, and forgotten doing it.
But there is no way of finding out for sure. If I try to think objectively about it, as an outsider would, I very much prefer the story of dropping ITW like K dropped me. It feels like a real, feelings-based decision that you would expect from someone experiencing a serious break-up for the first time.
It makes me wonder if most of my decisions in life were not actually rational, or even somewhat thought out, but just justified later by filling in the blanks with a story that appealed to me at the time. Is my life more fiction than non-fiction?
I think I'm okay with it, even if the answer is yes. What choice do I have, but to write about what I'm going through? I want to believe that my thoughts on a decision one day later are more accurate than 18 years later. But are they really?
How well do you think you remember things? I don't know any more. My plan is to let yesterday worry about itself, along with tomorrow. I've got enough to worry about today.
1 *It's an epic intro, 15 minutes of beautifully intertwined parts introducing Cinderella and her step mother and sisters, Jack and his mother and their dried up cow, the childless baker and his wife and the witch who cursed his father, and Red Riding Hood. The song also starts some of the characters on their plot arcs, which will eventually intersect in the woods, of course.↩
2 The original show is about 20 minutes longer, with one of my favorite songs cut, the reprise of "Agony" in which the two handsome princes sing about how they've each found another beautiful damsel in distress, but guess it's time to go back home to their wives.↩
3 She has a small boombox with CD player, a USB slot, and a 16 GB drive the size of my thumbnail. I load it up with songs she likes from my collection, songs ripped from her CDs, and songs Horyon downloads for her. There is no convenient way to navigate the collection on the drive, even though the songs are mostly in folders, but compared to the single-speaker cassette player I started with, it is the bomb. I think I might give her an MP3 player next Christmas. Time to up the music game.↩
4 I know, the word "disappear" suggests mystery, and that was clearly my fault. But I feel better saying disappear, and you are not writing this, so shut it.↩
5 An album is a collection of songs that belong together. The name comes from a disc made of vinyl with a groove cut into it. Minor irregularities in the groove would be converted into soundwaves by a needle, and amplified by a stereo system. Hence the terms "groovy" and "disc jockey" a.k.a. D.J. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.↩
6 Of course, I will park in front of a computer for hours at a time, but that will be for fun stuff.↩
7 My high school girlfriend and I really liked each other, and we are still friends (Hi J!), but we were not that deeply in love.↩
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