There must have been a day, one specific day, when I stopped taking in quite so much new music. And while it will have been a different specific day, I suspect there must have been one for you, too.

Look, I don’t believe that the best music was written and created during my teenage years, but it’s still clearly the case that where I used to absorb a huge amount of new music, these days it’s more of a trickle. At best.

It’s also now oddly limited. I recently became quite obsessed with “Useless Desires” by Patty Griffin, yet only that one song, not even the whole album it came from. Similarly, the “There She Goes” cover by Sixpence None the Richer, but nothing else of theirs. Beth Orton‘s “Sweetest Decline“, but not even the rest of its album. With Deb Talen there’s a good four or five tracks from her “Lucky Girl” album, but it’s really only “Bring Water” I listen to repeatedly, and I haven’t even tried her half-dozen other albums.

Hang on. “Bring Water” was 2017, apparently, and that may be when I first heard it. “Useless Desires” was apparently 2004, but it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve heard it and I vow that it’s the same with Sixpence, but apparently that comes from 1999.

Maybe 1999 was it for me.

For up to about then I was deeply into Bruce Springsteen, but after 1995’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” there would be whole albums I simply didn’t notice were out. And even on that last album, it’s only the title track that sticks with me.

Similarly, Cyndi Lauper‘s last new album, for me, was “Sisters of Avalon” in 1996, although her kind of acoustically re-recorded greatest hits one, “The Body Acoustic“, was 2005 and I relish that. Oh! Dar Williams also did an acoustic greatest hits called “Many Great Companions” that I adore and that was 2005 as well.

There is hope for me still.

I was doing a thing recently where I realised there was no music for a week. Music was simply absent, like it was leeched from the environment or erased from time, and somehow even though I had my whole music library in my pocket, I wasn’t able to listen to any of it. I think I didn’t notice the absence until I left and driving home I had Mary Chapin Carpenter and Francisca Valenzuela in the car with me at full, vehicle-shaking volume.

We are music hunter-gatherers when we’re young and later it’s like there’s no time for it, no space for anything more. I think our sense of scale changes, too, and I was trying to avoid repeating the word time there, our sense of time, and instead I may have attempted a musical joke. I promise not to do that again. Anyway. Our sense of time: I still think of Francisca Valenzuela as new to me, but I’ve apparently been a fan since her 2007 album “Muérdete La Lengua“. Or Regina Spektor, but I found her through 2009’s “(500) Days of Summer” film by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.

(Although god, “Spacetime Fairytale” from her 2022 album “Home, Before and After” is amazing.)

All of this music is in my head now. But in as near to literally as makes no odds, all music is in our phones and on our computers. All of it. We can randomly name a track and hear it immediately. Pretty much.

All of that music, devalued down to a monthly subscription price, and we don’t use it, we aren’t stocking up our every second with new artists, new albums. We’re just queuing for Oasis.

I want to be walking across Los Angeles late at night, as I did a few years ago, and being reduced to tears by then new-to-me Brandi Carlile track, “The Mother“. I want to catch up on what appear to be the last nine albums by Sheryl Crow that I’ve missed. I’m up to date with Suzanne Vega, but it’s still only her first seven albums that I keep coming back to.

And look, I know I’m being really specific about what music I happen to like and you must have your own, there must be music that matters to you that I’ve literally never heard of.

But then there’s this. I’ve linked every track I’ve mentioned, you could click to listen to at least a portion of any of it. Yet I doubt you will. We have a world of music available to us instantly, and I think we need that, I just think that at least after a certain age, after a certain day, we no longer absorb so much of it.

We’re no longer changed so much by it.

I don’t know, this thought just stops me in my tracks.