For all the discussion surrounding the way iTunes has forever changed, perhaps fractured, the common listening experience for better or worse; there is one unparalleled activity it has pioneered: that of shuffling one’s music library. The unique thrill of hearing a random curio that has lain unheard in your digital collection for an age, or even discovering something you weren’t even sure was there. There’s obviously a correlation between the size of a music library (some 107 days and 200GB of it, if you’re asking) and what of that amount is entirely skippable, but on those moments when the right song comes bursting through the speakers at the right time, it feels like serendipity... albeit encouraged serendipity.
I had just one such moment recently when performing an extensive clear-out of my room and the darkest recesses of my closet, with its shameful evidence of my romanticised hoarding. It was at the precise moment I was tossing up whether to dispose of some long-forgotten birthday cards or old love letters that Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) began playing.
To say that it was the right song at the right time was a bit of an understatement, without going too deeply into the murky waters of personal problems, I’d been going through some shit lately and its ‘personal advice as mellow song’ resonated hugely with me. There was of course, that funny nostalgic feeling one gets from hearing a song you haven’t heard in an age, that intangible feeling of dusting off the contours of something that surprisingly still fits so perfectly. I recall hearing it on triple j, then later on repeat on the fifth volume of their Hottest 100 compilations (the year No Aphrodisiac topped the poll). Despite the various versions available, this particular one is the seven minute plus version, distinguished by its opening “Ladies and gentleman of the class of ’97.” There on my bedroom floor, amongst a pile of junk and debris, hearing those numbers sounded out struck me instantly. I would have been merely a ripe thirteen years old, and despite my steady sonic diet of skate punk, slacker rock and compilations just like this one; I remember how the song stuck out to me in its own odd way. Jump to fourteen years on, and its sentimental advice struck a chord in a way that the adolescent me almost fobbed off as not being possible.
