Like a Morse-code message was sent from me to me
"Tuesday night I reorganize my record collection. ...When Laura was here I had the records arranged alphabetically; before that I had them filed in chronological order, beginning with Robert Johnson, and ending with, I don't know, Wham!, or somebody African, or whatever else I was listening to when Laura and I met. Tonight, though, I fancy something different, so I try to remember the order I bought them in: that way I hope to write my own autobiography, without having to do anything like pick up a pen. I pull the records off the shelves, put them in piles all over the sitting room floor, look for Revolver, and go on from there; and when I've finished, I'm flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am."
-- Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Last week, my friend E. came over after work to examine and borrow from my album collection. Partway through her study of the CD tower, she said, "Are these in alphabetical order?"

I acknowledged that yes, they are. They are also organized chronologically where I have more than one album by an artist. This is partly because I am a freak of nature, and partly because, as is true for everything else that is purposefully ordered, arranging them this way makes it easy for me to find what I want. I'm a little bit lazy and little more anal, and I don't like to hunt.

This conversation with E. is likely the reason that, while seated on the floor today, listening to a song and scanning my album collection, as I sometimes do for no good reason other than that I can, I suddenly remembered the High Fidelity method of organization: autobiographical.

First I gave myself an imaginary slap upside the head for not thinking of trying this before, then set about mentally (yes, mentally. Lazy. Anal. Remember?) reordering things, just to see if it could be done.

It can't be that hard, I thought.

After all, I bought the albums. I remember what CDs I rushed out to buy, what lyrics blew my mind, what songs constituted the soundtrack to formative periods of my life.

For instance, I know that I first heard, and promptly fell in love with, Death Cab for Cutie in January 2001, when "405" graced my stereo on a mix tape made by my friend and then-crush, J., with whom I would also see my first Death Cab show shortly after my 21st birthday.

I know that I listened obsessively to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and Tracy Chapman's New Beginning during finals week of winter term 2002 while frantically studying for my International Communication final and trying desperately to compose a coherent response to a take-home essay exam question for Ethnic Studies 330.

I know that I first heard Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica while driving around Portland with friends in the summer of 2000, and we discussed how everyone enjoyed the third track. But the album didn't really strike me until the spring of 2001, when it played in the background while I sprawled on my roommate's bed, watching her pack for spring break. As Isaac Brock intoned the weirdest lyrics ever about his sister being eaten by a pack of wild dogs, I decided I needed to acquire the album as soon as possible, which was roughly a week later.

For the first few mental shufflings, it all seemed simple enough, and I was starting to feel sort of smug about my powers of recall. But then I ran into complications.

I realized I had been thinking by band, not by album. I had assumed that when I determined where in the timeline (and the CD stand) a band belonged, all that band's albums would be grouped there, as in the present system. Obviously, I either failed to grasp the point of an autobiographical arrangement or failed to devote adequate brainpower to the organizational intricacies, which I quickly discovered when I got to my rather extensive collection of U2.

I was first seduced by Bono's voice in 1987, when the single of "With or Without You" was released. But I wasn't interested in buying a U2 album until 12 years later, when listening to "All I Want Is You" in my friend L.'s dorm room on a Friday night, and I wasn't really sold on their music until I bought Achtung Baby in September 1999 and listened to it nonstop for months. So did The Joshua Tree belong at the beginning of my album collection, in 1987, or near the end in 2001, when I actually bought it? If I put The Joshua Tree in 1987, I couldn't very well put albums that hadn't even been released in 1987, much less had an impact on my life, there, too.

Once I had this little revelation, it blew my tentative mental reshuffling out of the water. I couldn't put Death Cab's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes next to Transatlanticism because I wasn't even living in the same city when I bought them, for crying out loud. The same sort of situation goes for my two Modest Mouse albums and pretty much everything else.

You may notice that, because it had been so long since I'd read the book, I had overlooked another premise of the autobiographical system, which is organization by date of purchase. On the surface, it appears that if I had remembered this, it would have made my imaginary rearrangement easier. Organization by purchase date is, after all, a simple chronological system. But, unlike Nick Hornby's Rob, that kind of chronology is not only difficult for me to remember, but it's not actually autobiographical, as you can see from my U2 quandary.

When it comes to knowing when an album or a song changed my life, when I couldn't stop listening to it, when it consoled me or kicked my heart around the room, my memory is flawless. I was always listening to something, and so, in my recollections, something is always playing. Music, for me, is both part of memory and perhaps the most powerful aid to it. If I remember the date when I first heard a particular song or album, or wore it out from listening, it's because of the memory the music triggers -- which may or may not correspond to when I actually bought the album. For instance, I owned Counting Crows' Recovering the Satellites years before I thoroughly listened to and appreciated it. My musical life is more haphazard than Rob's, and finding chronological order in it more difficult. My autobiography, I discovered, isn't a timeline of when I owned the music, but when it mattered to me.

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"But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself more complicated than I really am. I have a couple of thousand records, and you have to be me ... to know how to find any of them."

As it turned out, that chronology, that autobiography, was too complicated for me to feel like tackling on random Thursday afternoon, much less every time I want to find an album. I think I get the same satisfaction from knowing my memories are hidden right in plain, alphabetized sight, and you have to be me to find them, that Rob does from the opposite arrangement. Despite my fondness for organization, I don't mind my life in music being hopelessly out of order; everything that matters is still there in tidy stacks, and I know just where to find it.

Song: Death Cab for Cutie, "I Was a Kaleidoscope"

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