Night Owl Cards

  People don't listen to albums anymore. I've heard that more than once over the last few years. It makes sense, I guess. With everyone's attention spans evaporating and the advent of stuff like Tik Tok, it's not a surprise that we're all hooked on the need for speed. No one has time to lie on their bed and let an LP wash over them. Or they don't think they do. I fall into that camp, too. Albums once were the objective when it came to music. I saved my money, walking into the record store was a religious experience, almost overwhelming. I worked in a department store in the mall in the mid-1980s. The record store was three stores away. I made many, many trips and bought many albums. Some bad decisions there, and some great ones, too.   This was ritual and that ritual lasted decades until the record stores closed and I changed my habits amid ipods shuffling and services streaming. I now have to force myself almost to listen to a whole album at once. In 2022, I fi...

When I am writing blog posts late at night, I almost always play music on my computer in the background. It helps me think. Although I am at an age where I should despise modern music, I don't. Not all of it anyway. I like a wide variety. But more often than not, I'll go back to the good ol ' days for my background tunes. And for me, that is the '80s, when I want to remember high school and college, and the '70s, when I want to remember childhood. So that's where the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett hit me, right in the middle of memories that I will always treasure. Michael Jackson's music was the soundtrack to my senior year in high school. "Beat It" was the anthem to the final four months before graduation, and freedom. You were nothing, and I mean nothing, if you didn't own the album "Thriller." You name a month in 1983 or 1984 and I can tell you what the hit Michael Jackson song was at that time. Farrah Fawcett wa...