CD's Nutschz!

When times are tough, people get back to basics. My suggestion for kickin' it old-school? Go music shopping. Before you ask yourself when the hell the CD became quaint, remember that most of us have been getting our music solely by downloading for many years now. After starting an iTunes search for one band that leads me to another and another and another, I have easily spent two hours, thirty bucks, and way too much time scanning some dude's "Shoegaze Mix". It's the reason record companies are going out of business, yet I have more than one Gordon Lightfoot song on my iPod.

But there is something irreplaceable about sifting through the racks and grabbing physical copies of whatever you dig. Getting out to the car, tearing the shrinkwrap off, listening to the opening strains while you scan the lyrics. ("Wow! They worked in nadir AND brucellosis") It's no revelation that your local music shop will have about a tenth of what you can find online, but vinyl aficianados and turntablists will spend hours in record stores with good reason- it's a ritual of sorts. Maybe it's years of handling albums and CDs in radio studios that has made me pine for the physical aspect of music, but it's an expedition that's definitely worth performing on occasion. Now that you're out of work, you've got plenty of time.