Why I Still Buy CDs in 2024

Six years ago, I wrote a blog post titled "Why I Still Buy CDs in 2018". At that time, it was beginning to feel like the Compact Disc was dying in popular culture, and that internet streaming was beginning to take over the music industry. And of course, that's exactly what happened. For most people, music is no longer something you buy, it's something you pay for a subscription to access over the internet. As this shift has happened, though, my belief in the superiority of the CD has strengthened. So today, I'd like to explain why I think the compact disc shouldn't be allowed to die, and why I think it is actually the best way to listen to albums in 2024.

Let's get a few things straight first. I'm not trying to say that CDs are perfect for every music listening need you might have, or that it's better than streaming for everyone. What I am saying is that the CD is a format that is much more convenient, useful, and practical for modern life than it gets credit for, and that you should consider listening to music on CDs if your listening habits align with the strengths of the format in today's music landscape. As evidenced by the growing size of my CD collection, I believe CDs make sense for me. They might make sense for you, too.

In my original blog post, I asserted that CDs were not as convenient as streaming, but I liked them anyways so I kept buying them. Six years later, I've changed my opinion. Buying CDs is more convenient than streaming for the kind of listener I am. I like listening to albums, in order, all the way through. I think that an album can be more than the sum of its parts, as I've already written numerous times on this blog. So let's compare what it takes to listen to an album in 2024 on streaming versus compact disc. Streaming is the most popular method, which requires a subscription or putting up with ads. Then, you have to find the album you want to listen to- that shouldn't be so hard, but often requires navigating through menus and swiping past distractions. Then, you need to hook your phone up to something to play the music out of, or else resign yourself to crappy phone speakers. Bluetooth is frequently unreliable for me and annoying to deal with, but to avoid it you'll need a dongle, which costs more money and in my experience reduces the audio quality considerably by adding hum that wasn't there before. Oh, and if you lose your internet connection, your music is interrupted. That's method one. Alternatively, you could take a CD, place it in a CD player, and just hit play.

Let's quickly run through some of the advantages of CDs as compared to streaming. CDs have no ads. You can buy a CD once and it's yours forever. You can buy them used for next to nothing- that's how I built my collection. You can rip those CDs to your computer and then put them on your phone or any other device you want- they'll be available whether you have an internet connection or not. If your computer doesn't have a CD drive, they can be bought pretty cheap as well, not to mention how cheap CD players are at thrift shops. I got my 5 CD changer for $15 and it is amazing. CDs have better audio quality than streaming, with no internet connection required. CDs typically also come with a booklet, which is totally worth a flip through if you're a big fan of the artist. And finally, when Spotify or Apple Music or whatever finally shuts down, you won't lose all your music if you have it on CD.

I want to dwell on that last point a little while. Right now, we're in a bit of an enshittification crisis. Online services in particular are rapidly getting worse as big companies compete to cut costs, to the detriment of their product. Online music streaming services are no different. User interfaces are getting clunkier and more cluttered. Features that used to be free are going behind paywalls, and features that used to be available with a subscription are being removed entirely. And after all that, you don't even own your music library on one of these services. Every online service eventually ends, and when Spotify ends, I'm going to lose all 200+ of my playlists unless I save them elsewhere beforehand. This will happen to every user of every streaming service eventually, and if you don't like it, you need to change your listening habits.

I still have CDs that I've had since I was a child. I have CDs that I've bought used that are twice as old as me, and they work just the same as they always have. And of course, I have new releases from this year. CDs predate Spotify, and while Spotify's quality is diminishing at the moment, CDs work just as well as they always have. When I bring up that I listen to CDs to friends, they'll often mention that they don't have a CD player anymore. To that I just want to say that it's a solvable problem. You can just go buy one, they aren't expensive. In the long run, streaming is much more expensive.

Of course, there are things streaming does that CDs can't really compete with. The modern understanding of playlists is a totally internet-reliant phenomenon, for example. You can make CD mixtapes, but nothing is quite the same as a 10+ hour playlist. CDs also don't allow you to discover new music as easily as you can on streaming services. In years past, when I wanted to find new music I'd put on Spotify's For You and Release Radar playlists and add anything that I enjoyed to my liked songs. Discovering new music through CDs requires an element of risk typically. However, I've never really discovered new music through CDs. I've almost always listened to albums on the internet before buying a CD, and that's still true. But when I find an album on streaming services that I like, I will almost always try to buy it if I really like it, assuming CDs for that album are even being made.

Over the last six years, I've come to the conclusion that CDs are valuable and are worth building listening habits around. Today, I listen to CDs in the car when I'm driving, at my desk using my CD player, and I rip every CD I buy so that I have it on my phone in case I ever want to deal with the hassle of plugging in or connecting bluetooth in exchange for the ability to listen to a CD I left at home but wanted to listen to anyways. I use Spotify when I want to listen to music in playlists, or albums I don't own but might want to someday, or listen to music recommendations from friends, or when I'm listening to music on a device that doesn't have access to my own music library. Both can coexist, but I find myself gravitating towards good old, physical CDs. As the internet gets worse, CDs stay the same. In 2018, I said CDs were less convenient but I liked them anyways. Today, I think that CDs are back to being more convenient. There just isn't anything easier than placing a disc in a CD player and hitting play.

Album Review: Where the Light Is: John Mayer Live in Los Angeles

 

I'm a big fan of live albums. As a performer myself, I love listening to a great performance that has been immortalized on tape. Of course, I know intellectually that a live album is not the same as going to a concert. There's a lot of mistakes that can be corrected after the fact in a recording, and Where the Light Is is no different. But there's still a special kind of magic that you get on a live album that you don't get from a studio album. And for an artist like John Mayer, that extra magic is where some of his best musicianship is. Where the Light Is is an incredibly well polished live album that is missing none of the live feel that I want from a good live recording.

Every genre of music has different expectations for what a live album should be. In jazz, for instance, it's almost taken for granted that a jazz album is recorded live, even if it's live from a studio. The ethos of jazz includes the expectation that jazz should be recorded with all the musicians in the same room, playing all at once, and that room should ideally be a jazz club with an audience. Even if it's not recorded in that setting, jazz albums are still expected to sound like they could have been recorded like that. Even in jazz studio albums, there is an expectation that there will be a live feel. On the other side of the spectrum, pop live albums have no such genre-wide mandates. A live album by a pop artist might include extensive post production editing including overdubs, autotune, and the concert the album was recorded at could have been entirely pre-recorded anyways. It's entirely possible to imagine a live album from a modern pop artist where no musicians were playing live, and the vocalist's performance was so heavily edited it couldn't qualify as live anymore either. And that's not to say that doesn't happen in other genres, but pop music doesn't try to hide it like jazz does.

John Mayer's live albums, and this one in particular, tend much closer to the jazz side of this spectrum than the pop side, at least when it comes to the live feel. Listening to Where the Light Is, you can't deny that it feels live. The album was recorded in a theater, and it sounds like it. I wasn't at the venue when it was recorded, but I find it hard to imagine much was lost in translation. Well, except for the two cut songs. There is that to be aware of. Because despite the audible crowd interaction and the perfectly imperfect live vocals, this album is still heavily polished- but not too heavily polished. The vocals sound like they were recorded on a typical live vocal mic, not a studio microphone, and you can hear that Mayer's distance to the microphone isn't consistent. The mixing engineers probably worked hard to get it to sound as good as it does, but it still sounds like a guy singing into an SM58 at a concert- a sound I'm well acquainted with, and a sound that sells the live feel to me in a subtle but powerful way.

Okay I'm three paragraphs in, I should probably start talking about the music. Where the Light Is comes in the form of a 2-CD double album, where the first disc is split between an acoustic set and the John Mayer Trio. The second disc is full rock band. Each of these sets has a mix of memorable John Mayer hits, deeper cuts, and a cover or two. The acoustic set tends towards older material, the trio set obviously draws heavily on the John Mayer Trio's album Try!, and the band set focuses on mostly material from John Mayer's latest album at the time, Continuum. I love the track listing here. There's a little bit of everything, and every John Mayer song is developed just a little bit more than it was when it was first released. There are extended solos, altered lyrics, brand new intros and outros, and all the other little things that make me love listening to live recordings. As a John Mayer fan, these are songs that I know, played in a new way. 

John Mayer's blues and rock roots are even more evident on his live albums than they are on his more pop-friendly studio releases. At the same time, I'm impressed at how well his songs translate over to a live context. The arrangements are largely the same as the original songs (with the exception of the acoustic set), but the band feels looser, like they're playing together and playing off each other more. It's not as sanitized as the studio albums are. It's not even like the studio albums are that sanitized or sterile, but there's just that extra 10% edge on the sound when it's done live. You can hear the chemistry between band members and if that doesn't make a live album worth listening to, I don't know what does.

As with Unreal Unearth, the last album I reviewed, Where the Light Is is an album that benefits from a full listen through rather than just picking out individual songs. Unreal Unearth is greater than the sum of its parts because it is a concept album, but Where the Light Is is stronger than any individual song because live albums are all about mentally putting yourself in the room where it happened. It's about imagining that it's December 2007 and you're in Los Angeles and you don't know what's going to happen next. Even if you do know, you have to pretend you don't.

I found this album at a record store in a trendy side of town that I didn't know existed until I walked past it one day. I stopped in, and found this album. I listened to it on the drive home, and it quickly became one of my favorite live albums. I listened to the band set while driving, with the stereo turned up as loud as I could stand, and listened to disc one at home through my my nice headphones to get all of the nuance of the more intimate sets. Since then, I've listened to the whole thing straight through, I've listened to just disc two with the band set, and I've had it in my shuffle rotation when I want to listen to John Mayer and I don't really care what songs come on. In all those contexts, this album makes me instantly happy as soon as it starts, because I know that it will suck me in quickly.

As I'm writing this, the last song of the album, "I'm Gonna Find Another You", just came on, and I know my time listening is almost up. Normally when I write these reviews, I listen to the album on repeat while I write, proofread, and re-write. While this album is plenty long (two hours and four minutes!), I know I can't let it repeat back to the beginning. My listening ends here, because the show is over. Maybe I'll edit this review while listening to a different John Mayer live album I have. But that's just the power of the live album- it draws you in, and asks you to play by its rules. Who am I to say no?

My favorite song from Where the Light Is is "I Don't Need No Doctor", a Ray Charles cover that caught my ear because it's one of the few songs I didn't already know when I first listened to this album. I love a good blues, and I love that it's the only song with presumably improvised solos for both the trumpet player and the saxophone player. As a jazz saxophonist myself, I really enjoyed that. I have no choice but to rate this album five stars.

Album Review: Unreal Unearth by Hozier

If I have an Album of the Year for 2023, it's Unreal Unearth by Hozier. Unreal Unearth is one of those albums that I wasn't really sure about the first time I listened to it, but I did know right from the beginning of the first track that there was some really good music in there. Over subsequent listens, I found myself connecting with the album on a level that I don't feel very often. 

The album opens with De Selby pt. 1 and De Selby pt. 2, which work together to set the tone for the album. The soundscape feels intensely intimate, especially in part one. It's hard to get any more intimate than a singer and a single acoustic guitar, but that intimacy is maintained throughout the album even as the arrangement grows in scope. De Selby pt. 2, while much louder and bolder, maintains that very personal feeling even with a completely different context for it. This continues throughout the album- Hozier's lead vocals are always soloistic, virtuosic, and incredibly emotionally potent whether he's singing softly over one or two instruments or singing over a full rock band mix. De Selby parts 1 and 2 show off both styles, and the rest of the album builds on those initial tracks.

Personally, I have some history with Hozier. In high school, I was unwillingly subjected to his 2013 single "Take Me to Church" with distressing frequency, as is the custom of top 40 radio. I didn't have the context of the album it came from (now a favorite of mine as well). I also probably wasn't really ready to appreciate the song's lyrical content. I just knew that it was another overplayed pop song that didn't have a place in my rotation of Taylor Swift, Owl City, and Slash ft. Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators albums. My friends at the time, in particular my longtime collaborator and dear friend Denaie, tried to get me to see the light, but I wasn't ready, so I let Hozier pass me by in high school, confident that I wasn't missing much.

But of course, times have changed. Owl City's music since The Midsummer Station has been hit or miss for me. I can't even listen to Taylor Swift anymore because I'm too annoyed by her as a person. And Hozier has wound up at the top of my rotation as one of my favorite artists and in the year 2024 I own all of his albums on CD. How did that happen?

Well, another one of my friends finished the work Denaie started. I'd like to thank Soleil (who made a Hozier cover with me!) for convincing me to listen to Unreal Unearth, which I did with initially low expectations. I've listened to other albums on their suggestion, with mixed results. I'm pretty picky when it comes to music so that's no insult to Sol's taste. But at any rate, I put Unreal Unearth on one night before bed, and gave it a listen. I didn't really get it, but I could tell that it was good stuff, the kind of good stuff that I wouldn't be able to fully identify on the first listen. There's this incredibly pretentious academic term called "high information music", which is basically the idea that some music is just better because it has more music happening in it than other music. I don't like that as a concept because it seems more likely to be used to belittle music that academics don't like rather than elevate music that your average music listener does, but I'm going to commandeer the term for that purpose here. Unreal Unearth is high information music that has a lot going on and it wasn't easy for me to tease out all that nuance and value the first time around, but I could identify that it was there. That's why I gave it a second listen, and a third, and a fourth... and the next thing you know I'm going to a Hozier concert and buying his CDs and putting them on every time I get in the car.

Unreal Unearth has some incredible individual songs, such as De Selby pt. 2, First Time, Francesca, Eat Your Young, Damage Gets Done, and First Light. But my favorite part of the album isn't any individual song or group of songs. It's the overall experience of listening to the album, from start to finish, where you can feel yourself being taken on a journey beginning with the descent into hell and ending with the emergence back into the light at the end. Unreal Unearth is a masterpiece in album sequencing, pacing, and storytelling without explicitly saying anything about the story. I'm a big fan of listening to albums from start to finish, and this is an amazing album for that purpose. There are songs on this album that are not satisfying at all when listened to out of context, but feel like important moments of arrival when encountered in the course of a full album listen- one example being Son of Nyx.

The climax of the album, and one of the best songs, is the song First Light. It represents the conclusion of the journey; the return to where it started. The entire album comes to a head here, and to describe it in too much detail would only do it a disservice, so I'll keep it short and just say that this song, when heard at the end of the album after an hour of music, is incredible. It's one of the best album closers I've ever heard, a fitting compliment to the De Selbys, which together are one of the best album openers I've ever heard. It's a satisfying conclusion to an amazing arc that you would never experience if you only ever listened to #1 hits. Maybe high school me was right all along: one Hozier song out of context isn't all that great. But now that I've heard the album and understood the context, all of the individual songs are elevated. That's true of the singles from Unreal Unearth, and it's doubly true for Hozier's debut album that I panned all those years ago- perhaps that will be the subject for a future album review.

Before concluding, I need to take a moment to talk about the textures and instrumentation of Unreal Unearth. The sustained intimacy of this album despite its dynamic highs and lows is only possible because of the instrumentation. Unreal Unearth employs a dark sound comprised of very human instruments- acoustic pianos and guitars, a string section, and choirs all give the album a distinctly human touch. When things get more intense, we hear a rhythm section consisting of a bass guitar dripping with personality, tight drumming on a funk-sounding kit that I can't get enough of, electric piano and simple synth patches that mostly stay out of the way of the arrangement, and electric guitar sounds that could have come out of the 70s- and I love it. Hozier's use of fuzz and overdrives in a way that don't overpower the sound aren't exactly revolutionary, but they are refreshing. As a guitarist myself, I love the rich layers of acoustic and electric guitars that create the spacier sounds on this album, and I love the tight rhythm playing that locks in with the rest of the rhythm section so well. In particular, the guitars on Anything But are layered so densely and yet the overall sound is so light and airy. Whatever the intensity level of the music is, it's being played in a way that makes it apparent that real people are the ones doing it, and I love it.

All this talk and I've barely even mentioned the lyrical themes of the album, but that's not exactly what I listen to Unreal Unearth for. The lyrics are genius of course, and I appreciate them, but I'm here for the music. I'm here for the soundscapes. I'm here for the grooves, and I'm here for the stellar vocal performance that reminds me the voice is an instrument too, and it can be infinitely nuanced and expressive. What he's saying with that voice is profound and deeply interesting, but it's not what I'm primarily here for.

Unreal Unearth was easily my favorite album of 2023, beating out competition from Metallica's 72 Seasons and Olivia Rodrigo's GUTS, both of which I've enjoyed thoroughly since they came out. It's hard to pick a favorite song from Unreal Unearth, but if I had to pick, I'd go with the first song that I really loved from this album- my favorite track is De Selby pt. 2.