I will say, however, that I’m concerned that all too many aficionados will continue to experience music without a certain level of cohesion, and I don’t mean this in a purely formal sense.  After all, if artists more consistently made good albums, maybe consumers would be more willing to shell out twenty bucks to buy them.

No, I’m referring to the ways in which albums, even more so than just one song, can enhance memories and sensations or even the memories of sensations.  Our parents’ generation gets this more than any other because they grew up with the Album.  I’ve heard dozens of stories about my friends’ dads listening to Tommy or Abbey Road late at night as they stared out into nothing and just fell into the music, some of them nearly getting choked up, the memories coming back so vividly.

We no longer inhabit that musical moment.  Instead, we’re back to the 50s and the ever-vapid “single,” and  while we continue to forge bonds with particular songs—recalling where and when we were when we first heard them, how they made us feel, what we were thinking just then—we’re less likely to access those memories with any regularity due to the instantaneousness of music.  There’s so much out there, who has time to dwell on one song?

But creating musical memory banks is still possible in the digital age.  Occasionally I get these flashbacks to certain weeks in my life that are intimately linked to particular albums, and I’m so thankful for them that I’m trying to document them as completely as I can.  Some are more substantial than others, they may even seem trivial at times, but all have resonance.   

Senior year at Williams.  My friend Charles and I had a terrible habit of routinely staying up until 7 a.m. idly doing homework, French-pressing Ethiopia Sidamo coffee from Starbucks, talking movie ideas, venturing out into the common room to watch reruns of “Alias,” and listening to down-tempo music at a low volume in his cramped but cozy single.

More often than not I had to read about 400 pages a day just to keep up with all of my classes, which really wasn’t that bad, since most of it was literature.  On this particularly night I had to finish Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, a book I deplored while reading but would later come to appreciate.  With roughly 250 pages to go, I prepped the second French-press of the night and placed it on Charles’s dresser.  He had one of those really small presses, so we usually had to prep three to four a night to maintain a sufficient caffeine buzz.

Charles was reading something much worse than I:  He was reading about the Law.  His Legal Studies class was killing him, and he’d really fallen behind.  Tonight would be long for him. 

He propped himself up on his elbows on his bed, his face inches away from the encyclopedic volume.  I sat hunched in his desk chair in front of his computer, occasionally lifting a finger to play a song I wanted to hear on his iTunes playlist.  We carried on this way for two hours.

2 a.m. and Charles is really struggling.  He gets up to make more coffee, I decide to surf the net for some music.  I had just discovered some more excellent late night material in the guise of Lilly Allen, Madeleine Peyroux, Gotan Project (a group I’ll probably write about later), and Hooverphonic.  I had heard the Belgian group’s song “2Wicky” on the soundtrack to this movie Heights, a decent but relatively forgettable little film with Glenn Close in it.  I recall she was pretty good.

Anyway, I really liked that song, it made me think of the Manhattan skyline, with its swank guitar line, throbbing bass, and sultry vocals.  A song like that is particularly alluring when you’re hundreds of miles away from Manhattan in a frigid valley in western Massachusetts reading Xeroxed handouts.  I went to MySpace, found one of their pages, and played “2Wicky.”

Charles came in just then, French-press in hand, and asked me what we were listening to.  I was flattered he should ask, I just assumed he would know.  He’s a real music junkie, that’s initially how we bonded.  The first time we met was the very first day of college.  This affable Haitian with an abbreviated afro walked into my room, heard Radiohead coming through the speakers, left, and then returned with his portable hard-drive and downloaded every music file I had on my computer.  Friends ever since.

Eventually, I came to inherit his appetite for down-temp acts like Massive Attack and Thievery Corporation.  So if there was an act he hadn’t heard of, I was always impressed.

A slow grin came to his face as the song concluded.  He liked it.  A lot.  It made him forget he was at Williams just then.  The next song on the page to play was “Inhaler,” the first song on A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular, the group’s first record.  To our nodding pleasure, it was even moodier than “2Wicky.”  We pillaged MySpace for more songs and came up with “Mad About You” and “Jackie Cane” off of The Magnificent Tree, both ace songs.  We liked these Hooverphonic people. 

We visited Lilly Allen that night, upon whom Charles instantly developed a crush, Madeline Peyroux, her voice a warm blanket on such a dreary night, and “Gotta Get Myself Into It” by the Rapture.  We probably played that one for an hour straight.

When we finally decided to drag ourselves back to work, we returned to Hooverphonic.  If we were going to do this, we would have to feel like we weren’t really there.  Hooverphonic and gourmet coffee were the only tools available to this end.  We got back to work at around 4 a.m.

I finished The God of Small Things at about 6:30, and I had no idea what I thought of it.  Its last 50 pages went by quickly, so I conceded that at least the ending was somewhat compelling.  “Plus Profond,” the fourth song on Spectacular, was playing again when I finally stood up to stretch, which seemed perfect.  The sun was thinking about making its appearance but hadn’t, so the sky was a cool blue.  Like “Plus Profond.”  And yes, that’s the correct spelling.

Charles was still awake but fading fast; he had a class in three hours and was trying to figure out if a short rest was worth it.  I told him it was and grabbed my books, my bag, and my car keys and bid him farewell.  Until 14 hours later, when we would do it all over again.

I went out into a surprisingly mild morning to find a neon green slip of paper the size of a book mark jammed down the sideof the driver’s side window of my car.  A parking ticket from Williams Security, how nice.  Ordinarily I would have begun the process of constructing a good enough story to get the ticket repealed, but I didn’t care just then.  Everything was alright.
Now, whenever I listen to A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular (like right now), it transports me back to that memory as vividly as a photographic might.  In that sense, it has become a different kind of “album” entirely.