I recently came in contact with a good old, long lost friend. It’s not like he fell off of the face of the earth; he hadn’t moved an inch from the house where I last saw him over a decade ago. Apparently I’m the one that disappeared from the planet, but things fell in place again, and the all-seeing Facebook tracked me down. This friend of mine from way back in high school is literally the definition of my early musical identity since he nudged me to all the “mod” 80’s bands, but really set me down the road with an obsession for Cocteau Twins and the like. We diverged a bit after high school and I continued the evolution on my own. Imagine the sociology experiment of seeing how the two of us developed our musical tastes after wandering on our own so long.

We passed through some similar environmental conditions, like becoming cynical of the world and withdrawing to online gaming, but then he has an engaging family life. I peek out my curtains and curse the people walking by. His wife has a decent appreciation for music and his kids turn to him for paternal counsel on cool 80’s bands. The people around me hear one of Mozart’s whimsical but richly colorful concertos and proclaim, “Ooh, classical music!” To my astonishment, my friend also has a collection of records so extensive he couldn’t possibly listen through them in a human lifespan. Each time I go to visit he rapid-fire flips through swaths of his collection deeply rooted in endangered idioms of aloof decades past. He’ll queue up tracks from all throughout time and space and I strain to light up long dormant neurons to remember them. According to him I must have been way out of it if I hadn’t heard them.

It turns out we have not followed parallel evolution, being where similar species long separated react the same to environmental conditions and develop the same characteristics. I’m more the shoegazer/industrial/goth type and he seems to be more into headbanger/euro-techno/… and well I haven’t gotten through two-thirds of his collection. What amazes me though is I like a lot of the new things he’s played for me and I’ve got a lot of new ideas to try out. This is going to open things up a bit since I’ve been in isolation so long, not expanding my borders much. Sure we have a lot of old stuff in common, and I’m sure I’ll slowly “remember” more from Blancmange (Ooh, it’s a dessert too!) and The Specials. The value of a good friend is to be enriched with a different perspective and to find something new in life.