Music is difficult to let go of. Especially when cute girls are involved, I guess, and surprisingly often they are.

I have come to the CDs that resist being thrown in the garbage. Even though the song being ripped right now is actually called “Trash”. It is by Suede, from the album “Coming Up”. I have not played it for some time – a couple years, surely. And even when I did, I only played two of the tracks. One was “Trash”, the other was (even more appropriately) “Lazy”. There is a story behind that, of course.

I bought this CD (like so many others) after listening to these tracks repeatedly at the home of my best friend over many years, the amazing Superwoman. (I wrote about remembering this already in 2001. Complete with embarrassing daydream about her. Well, more like embarrassingly safe for work.) Whenever I heard them later, a part of me remembered those times, which were good times indeed. Not that times are bad now. They are good in a different way though. One of the differences is that I can’t sit down with my online friends and listen to music together. At least not yet. I am mildly surprised that this is not yet possible. Perhaps it is, but I just don’t know about it?

In any case, over several years most of my new CDs came from listening to music together with her. She had great taste in music, although she was more omnivorous than I. It took me quite a while to find some music on my own after we parted ways completely. And most of what I’ve bought after that has been Japanese pop that I learned from watching anime.  Eventually I also found some songs via Last.FM, but those are mostly bought via iTunes so I don’t need to rip them and throw away the CDs… Someone did that already.

The previous CD that I ripped today was “luring” by Odd Nordstoga. If you think Odd is an odd name, you are probably not Norwegian. He is one of the few remaining artists that create and sing songs in my native language, Nynorsk (New Norwegian). If you think it looks more like New Norse, that is not far off either. It was created during the time when Norway was awakening to national independence, and its purpose was to gather the heritage from old Norse that had been preserved in our dialects during the centuries of Danish and later Swedish rule. But the pressure from the Danish-Norwegian BokmÃ¥l (Book Language) favored in the cities has gradually polluted the ur-Norwegian language, so that today only a few of us can write it fluently without unwittingly bastardizing it with Danicisms. Among those few are I and Odd Nordstoga. And possibly my friend Zimena (her name changes from time to time, as she has a lot more to protect than I, and anyway her journal is friends-only for a while now). She is a much greater fan of Nordstoga than am I. Truth be told, the only track I played more than once on that CD was the first one, the national smash hit “Kveldssong for deg og meg”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2004.

The first of the tree CDs I throw out today is “Dreamland” by Robert Miles. Again this was one I learned about from my best friend, but while she was taken by the song “Children” (if I remember correctly), having seen a music video of it, I preferred the song “One & One”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2001. Seems I did remember correctly after all those years. Woo, go me! And I already wrote about it in 1999, one of my entries most worth reading actually, once it finds it was a bit down the page. “Let’s stand still in time” – that was indeed in some ways the high point of my life. A part of me wants to go back and live that year again – and again, and again. Yes wouldn’t that be nice… if I could do it without losing what I have gained since. But I can’t. But at least I don’t need to lose the song, even if I throw away the CD.