Brett Seybert

Felix Kent, writing at Defector¹:

For either my 12th birthday or the Christmas before my aunt gave me a copy of R.E.M’s Green, which has an orange cover. She also gave me a copy of Belinda Carlisle’s Runaway Horses (Belinda looking sultry in black and white and a crochet sweater thing) and a third album. I can’t remember what the third album was; it might have been the Bon Jovi album with the cover that looked like denim.

While Felix ultimately comes to the conclusion not that this now old-fashioned tradition of being “stuck” with an album and listening so much that you learn to love it was a good thing, but rather that “it was bad and annoying that getting music was so hard,” it still conjured some particularly nostalgia for me that I couldn’t resist.

Right around the same time in my life – I am almost certain is was the Christmas after my 12th birthday – our big family gift was a desktop computer. An Emerald Green Acer Aspire. It was the first computer our family ever had and eventually became the gateway to our first internet access. But before it was that gateway, it was also our first CD player. I remember that the big surprise was given away² ever-so-slightly because three of the gifts shoved in my enormous stocking that year, which was traditionally opened before all the presents (especially any big family presents), were CDs: Queen’s Greatest Hits I; Weezer’s Blue Album; and Goo Goo Dolls' A Boy Named Goo.³

I relentlessly listened to these three CDs. I can still sing along to all three of them. For two of them, this is not surprising: a greatest hits compilation by one of history’s greatest rock bands and a seminal 90s post-grunge album that would serve as the cornerstone for the development of my musical tastes to this day. But that third one sticks out a little bit. A Boy Named Goo is not, now, one of my favorite albums of all time. It is not one that I remember as having had an outsized influence on my overall musical taste or one that I would hand-pick to be among the first to play through my car’s speakers years later on my 16th birthday. For the Goo Goo Dolls, it was a bit of a transitional album as I have come to understand. The success of the mega-hit “Name,” the sixth track on that CD, undoubtedly changed the future trajectory of that band and sounds, in many ways, like a lot of their future radio hits. But a lot of A Boy Named Goo is faster paced and has a harder edge representative of the punk sound of their pre-“Name” albums. (Truthfully, I never really listened to another Goo Goo Dolls album nearly as thoroughly as I listened to A Boy Named Goo, but the sound of the majority of that album is nothing like the sound that I think is most frequently associated with the band. Their Greatest Hits album, for example, does not contain a single song from any of their four albums that preceded A Boy Named Goo and contains only “Name” from that record.)

But, because, at the time (for the next couple years, anyway, before Napster and the rest ushered in a new era), “getting music was so hard,” I wore that CD out. Even though it wasn’t what I expected. I’d heard “Name” and “Naked” on the radio and loved them. Sure, this CD had those two tracks but most of it sounded quite different⁴. Had I heard those two singles in the new era of music availability, the algorithm would have recommended more songs that sounded like those songs, rather than songs by the Goo Goo Dolls, specifically, and I may have never heard the rest of the album. But because it was one of three CDs that I owned for some time, it was in the regular rotation and I grew to love it. Maybe that doesn’t happen if music is more available at the time. Probably it wouldn’t have. And I think I probably land on the same side as Felix that “the fact that good things can come out of contingencies does not make the contingencies good,” but there’s definitely something I miss about the way this all used to work.