A year ago my hard drive crashed and I lost the music collection I’d been building since college. Much of the music I listened to regularly I had in albums on CD, but a good portion of the songs I lost were from various bits and pieces of soundtracks and compilations, mixes gifted from friends, albums I no longer liked and CDs acquired as a joke and then neglected. The kind of songs I’d forget I had until they came up in the playlist. At one point I’d backed up all of these stray songs on a variety of miscellaneous mixes I made for things like road trips or mowing the grass; I liked to throw in surprises to shake things up. But when my hard drive crashed, not long after a +1000 mile move, and I couldn’t remember the fate of these made-for-discman CDs. Music is said to help aid memory retention. So is repetition. This means its easier to learn state capitals or the letters of the alphabet when they’re set to a tune, but it also explains some of the contents of my music collection. I have songs, decades old, that I hated when they first came out.
