Bobby's Blog

A thing I don’t talk about much on my blog, or anywhere for that matter, is music. Music has been an important part of my life since my teenage years.

(This is a statement anyone could make, of course. Those are the years you are supposed to listen to music and develop your tastes.)

I am also a music hoarder. I have my physical collection of CDs and vinyl albums, and I have my immense and eclectic collection of digital albums. I could have used this post to talk about the many amazing albums that have had a profound impact on me over the years, or even post about my favourite albums of all time.

I will leave that type of brain-racking for another day and instead talk about an album near the top of my personal mountain of desert island discs called La De Da by Joel Plaskett.

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The year was 2005. I was half-way through my Bachelor’s degree working three jobs and tried to listen to as much new music as possible. Despite the 50 hours of work I was doing each week, money wasn’t growing on trees, so most of my music came from Soulseek.

The cliché of discovering all sorts of new sounds at university turned out to be just that in my case: nothing but a cliché. Everyone generally listened to the same music. Our campus had its own peer-to-peer network (using Direct Connect) and it was quite fast. The variety was poor, and the quality was poorer. Students sharing piss-poor copies of transcoded WMA files wasn’t my thing.

In order to keep my collection fresh, I sourced albums from everywhere. Pitchfork had yet to be purchased by Condé Nast, but my favourite source was the free magazine you could pick up in the music store: Exclaim!. Coming in second was an online chart, !earshot. I would generally download every album mentioned, listen to them, and decide if they were worth keeping.

A constant problem, though, was the case of local music. If an album managed to get some national recognition, it would turn up on Soulseek. Sometimes patience was required…

In March 2005 a review by Vish Kanna (check out the Kreative Kontrol podcast) caught my eye:

[…] With no real songs in place, Plaskett chose to challenge himself by writing new material on the drive down and trusting the rest to spontaneity in the studio.

Whoa…

An unfairly talented singer-songwriter, Plaskett makes playing mostly every instrument himself seem effortless […]

WHOA!

Alas, Soulseek came up with bupkis. Serendipity would have it that I needed to go to the city that weekend (we can say the city where I am from because there is only one, Halifax.). The city meant a big box store, and that meant a larger collection of music. Plus, why wouldn’t a store in the city where the artist was from have the album?

After a long week of work and school, I made it to the city and purchased a copy of this album.

Again, I might have to make a point for younger readers: in 2005 there was no YouTube or streaming. Some sites let your hear samples, but I didn’t do that. I dropped my cash out of pure curiosity.

Once in my vehicle I removed the plastic from the jewel case. I then extracted, carefully, the liner notes and flipped through them a little, letting the “new CD smell” waft over my face. I popped the CD in (cars had those once upon a time). Pressing play immediately would have been an error. I needed to get on the highway first.

Heading south on the 103, just after merging into traffic from exit 2B, I pressed play.

Since that moment, and throughout the past 20 years, La De Da has not left my playlist.

The muscle memory of my eardrums knows the frequencies in the same way smells trigger memories. They conjure images of highways, university campuses, late night studying, rolling joints, boarding a plane, and living alone for the first time. They have been played on CD, mp3 and FLAC; from iPod to BlackBerry to Archos to Shanling. They were hummed to my son to put him to sleep. And last week, the sun came out in Normandy, and the shuffle button pulled a banger out of the 5,000 songs on my DAP: the opening track to La De Da.

Just like that I was Benjamin-Buttoned there and back again while walking to the bus. A smile crept across my face, the tiniest of tears welled up. I caught my bus, but when I got off I didn’t rush to work.

I sat down and listened to this perfect fucking album until the last note.

Listen to La De Da