musical flow

yesterday i was talking to my friend matthew about musical influences that shaped his current tastes. as we talked he sat down and began to diagram it out for me. the ones he could remember, starting with the earliest ones and then moving forward into young adult life. as he brought me up to speed i could see more clearly the threads and links that associated to form a more cohesive line to the kind of stuff he's into now. and it inspired me to do something similar. like that scene in "high fidelity" when todd lousio knocks on john cusack's door and finds him organizing his vinyl. "chronological?" "no" "not alphabetical?" "nope" "what then?" "autobiographical".
i started this little exercise yesterday on a paper sack after our conversation. it quickly filled up and even this latest incarnation pictured above is lacking. but it's a good start. and maybe someday when i've got too much time on my hands and a little warm wine in my belly i'll try and clean it up some. connect the dots a little better. but the real lesson i learned from this was how difficult it becomes to categorize certain sounds. how freely some artists seem to merge with distinct styles and how much cross-pollenization and new hybrid music emerges. and also going back in my mind it began to better frame a complete soundtrack of my life tying certain groups and songs to specific memories.
and at first my instinct was to leave off certain bands that maybe only contained a memory repository of one song. but the more i considered it i felt this was an unfair criteria. i mean how many of us can listen to one song and immediately have it bring back all the memories of one summer or be so tied to an individual from our past as to act like an anthem? sometimes when i hear "come on eileen" by dexy's midnight runners i get this feeling of a time when i was still in high school and it feels like lost innocence. so happy it makes me smile. and i can still smell the vinyl seats in my friend john's vw rabbit and see the leaves falling as we sped through old redwood road at speeds much to great. speeding backward into memory.