On music.

I am 31 years old, which is an age at which a few things have been happening for a while, for many people: One, life moves much more quickly. That line in that Pink Floyd song about and then one day you find / ten years have got behind you that seemed absurd when you were sixteen and listening to it in Jason’s basement, because how could anyone lose ten years, starts to make sense. When you’re sixteen, ten years is more than half your life. You can’t possibly imagine not noticing all of the time that’s passed since you were six. Even when you are in your early twenties — the decade between 13 and 23 is a big fucking decade. But as you get older, your perspective on time necessarily changes. Waiting until next Christmas, when you are eight years old, seems impossible, because you’ve only had eight of those things so far. But it sneaks up on your when you’re this age, because it’s just one of thirty-some Christmases you’ve seen. This is not a failure of passion or imagination — it is simple mathematics. Time doesn’t literally move faster as you get older, but your ability to perceive it within the context of your life changes dramatically, and in such a way that it may as well literally move faster.

Two, the role of music in your life often changes. This, too, is to be expected. When you are seventeen, every song you love speaks to your life, because your life is probably about people who inspire you or make you feel gooshy when you see them or about wanting to get out of your small town or about having big dreams or about being sad because you love someone who doesn’t love you back — and those are things that songs convey perfectly. It is very easy to be in love with pop music as a teenager, because it is the most accurate and compelling mirror to your life that you can find. (It’s come to my attention, incidentally, that High Fidelity is actually about a man who refuses to mature because he fears losing the ability to connect to these songs more than he fears being alone. It is a sadder story in that context, but more useful.)

Anyway, you get older and the number of people writing songs that are about things you care about as much as you cared about those things when you were seventeen is much smaller. Maybe you hit a divorce or a major breakup, and if you didn’t waste Blood On The Tracks on the fact that Laura didn’t like you back when you were eighteen, you’ve got that one. But it’s a search — and then when you find someone like Jeffrey Lewis or Craig Finn or David Dondero, who speaks to your current situation the way that, I dunno, Ben Folds or whoever spoke to you as a teenager, you hold on to them with both hands.

I am a music writer, at least some of the time, but there are times when I am deeply bored with new music. The themes are dull, the sounds remind me of things that I heard back when it was easier to relate to music, and the experience of seeking out new bands to be passionate about just reminds me of how much I’d really rather be listening to Mojave 3 or Carla Bozulich.

This year, I have been fortunate to have a lot of room for new music in my life. And I have realized that this mitigates the pace at which life moves as you age. I’m listening to my 2011 Music playlist in iTunes right now, and I’ve got Burst Apart by The Antlers on right now. It’s a lovely record, of course — I have made friends with these songs, and they keep me company on nights like tonight, when I am through with going to bed early and want to hear things that mean something to me. But it also feels very much like a record I used to listen to, back in the old days of, like, this past May. Listening to Tell Me by Jessica Lea Mayfield tonight makes this past February feel like it was a thousand years ago. “Go Outside” feels like it came out a thousand years ago. If I put on High Violet, it will sound like I first heard it when I was in high school. This music that I have loved recently, it all feels like it comes from the past now.

This is amazing. In so many ways, life feels like it is always moving more and more quickly. But loving new songs is a chance to slow that down, to make things that happened six months ago feel like ancient history. This is very important.