How to Listen to Music

I do it my way.

I grew up listening to a lot of Beatles music. My parents bought some of their records, and one of my favorites was, and still is, Rubber Soul. It’s one of many albums that I’ve listened to enough that as soon as one song ends, I know which song will come next.

The wrong Rubber Soul

But I had a bit of a shock when I first played Rubber Soul on Spotify. Not only were the wrong songs on there — the album began with “Drive My Car,” a song I’d never heard on Rubber Soul at all! Plus, the song sounded like it belonged to an earlier Beatles era, not to an album that marked a shift in their music.

It made no sense. “Drive My Car” had a different tone from the rest of the album, and “Nowhere Man” belonged on Yellow Submarine (yes, I’m aware it’s not actually on that album, but it’s in the movie, and I know I heard it as a child on our record player, somehow). Plus, they’d left off one of my favorite songs, “It’s Only Love.” It was all wrong.

Except it wasn’t. What I’d found on Spotify was the original British version; Capitol Records had modified it and various other Beatles albums for their American releases. For all those years, until Spotify came along, I hadn’t known I was actually listening to the wrong Rubber Soul — though I still maintain that it was, in fact, the correct version. Many people don’t agree with me, and I’m certainly no music expert. But for me, the American version is vastly superior. It’s the album I love, and I will not be persuaded otherwise.

The song choices do change the character of the album, as has been pointed out, with the American version having more of a folk rock feel. For me, the American version of Rubber Soul evokes childhood, along with the psychedelic feeling of the 1960s and early 1970s. Although I knew nothing about psychedelics back then, I loved the mod and psychedelic images and sounds of the time — and childhood is a pretty psychedelic time. So perhaps it’s fitting that this music had such a hold on me. It still does.

The mod cover of one of the few records I’ve kept, one I loved to hear as a child.

The wrong song interpretations

I don’t just insist that Beatles albums be the way I’m used to hearing them. I also want the songs to sound the same. I admit it: I’m a Beatles purist.

Rafael loves different interpretations of their songs and often tries to convince me to love them, too. But I’m a bad audience for these attempts. I stubbornly refuse to appreciate any deviations from the sounds — and sequence of sounds — I’ve come to expect. I mean, when something is so perfect to begin with, why mess with it? I feel the same way about classic movies like Miracle on 34th Street.

When it comes to music, this is not limited, for me, to the Beatles. But when it comes to the Beatles, I’m the most hard-core. I will not budge. If anyone’s going to play their songs, I want them to channel the Beatles, as Drew Harrison and James Funk of Two of Us do so well in this short video taken on my phone:

I’m sure this says a lot about me. Unlike Rafael, who’s open to new musical experiences — even when they’re distortions of old experiences — I cling to what I know and love. Is that a bad thing?

Listening to albums

Here’s another way that Rafael and I are different. Like many people, Rafael likes to make playlists. He has over 80 Pandora playlists, which he gives names like BujiWuji.05 (yes, there’s also a 1, 2, 3, and 4), Eclectica_Medium Spicy, and Chrono_ProtoPunx 1958-75.

I like to listen to albums.

One of life’s joys that we’ve lost with streaming music services is listening to whole albums. Of course, it’s still possible to do that on the streaming services — unless some of the songs mysteriously vanish, as I found to be the case the last time I tried to listen to the Nick Lowe compilation Basher on Spotify, now missing half its songs.

I realize that people have been listening to music on the radio for much longer than Spotify has been around. There, you have even less control over what you’ll hear. But radio stations have been known, at least in the past, to play entire albums now and then.

I do enjoy the occasional playlist. And I sometimes let Spotify do its thing and serve me up the songs its algorithm decides I want to hear. But I still insist on listening to albums.

There’s a lot to be said for that. For one thing, if you really like something, don’t you want more of it? I’m not good at rapidly switching gears in the rest of life, so why do it with music? For another, an album is generally a cohesive work that was put together in a specific way for a reason. I realize that breaks down a bit with the American version of Rubber Soul, but it’s still true for the most part.

The first album I ever bought (well, got my parents to buy for me) was Hair, when I was eight years old. I chose it because I liked the song “Hair”; I had no idea it contained all those other (much better) songs. Without the album, I would have missed out on them.

The battered cover of the album I’ve kept all these years. If you look closely, you can see my name in the upper right.

Obsessively listening to albums

Okay, maybe I take it a bit far. When I discover something new, I listen to it over and over obsessively. Rafael put up with me playing Hamilton every morning for months (and yes, that does mean I know the first half much better than the second half, as I didn’t often make it through the whole thing before I had to start working).

I do this with older music, too. Lately, I’ve been on a kick of listening to Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom, which I last played obsessively in college when it came out — back in 1982. I’ve also been listening to the 5th Dimension’s Up, Up and Away, which my parents played now and then when I was growing up, and Les Nubians’s Princesses Nubiennes, a bit more recent but still so last century.

Invariably, I play an album so much that at some point, I finally get sick of it and have to stop listening to it for a while.

Why do I do this?

I guess I have an obsessive mind. That’s nothing to brag about, but it seems to be the way my brain is made. Maybe it’s good that I live with Rafael, who jolts me out of my usual routines with new songs, new artists, and new ideas. It’s hard not to feel like his way of approaching these things is superior to mine. But it’s not the way that brings me the most comfort and joy. Aren’t those good things to get from music?

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How do you like to listen to music? Let me know in the comments!