divine angst

Today has been…a day. Mr. Angst had ANOTHER blowout on his way to work. Two weeks to the day from the last one.

Same tire, even. (The spare, to be exact.) We thought something must be wrong with the axle, or the brakes, or something in that vicinity. Nope. Just old tires. The spare? Was the original spare, all of 11 years old. It had DRY ROT. As did the first blown out tire. Old tires. Sitting in the sun. Getting rotted.

And lemme tell ya, there’s nothing to make your morning anxious and scary like your spouse calling you from an expressway during rush hour to tell you he’s standing on the shoulder with a blown-out tire and no spare and the tow truck is going to take an hour and a half to get to him. (That was ridiculous, so I called my body shop, which also tows, and they got someone to him in 20 minutes. Thank you Melissa in Dispatch. You saved me an ulcer.)

Four weeks, four weeks, four weeks till moving day and no more cars. Four weeks.

I don’t usually like to admit deficiencies. But I think the time has come for me to admit something, because I need help.

I don’t know anything about music.

The music I listen to is almost exclusively from the past. My parents got me hooked on Neil Diamond, Johnny Cash, Anne Murray, Billy Joel. My childhood and adolescence introduced me to Depeche Mode, The Cure, Erasure, Blondie. Every now and then, I see a movie with terrific music and buy a soundtrack—The Wedding Singer, Office Space (really, just for “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster”), Garden State—and every now and then I get lucky and the CD store is playing something terrific.

But basically, I don’t know much about music. I don’t know what to buy. I am lost in a music store, bemused by rack after rack of music in the “Pop-Rock” section. I look at names and cover art and song titles and have no idea what any of it means. The employees all seem too cool for me and I’m too insecure to approach them. I’m getting close to 30, after all—I’m embarrassed to ask elementary music questions.

So I need some help. I can’t listen to the same music anymore. I have over 1,000 songs in iTunes and I am tired of 90% of them because I have listened to all of them so often.

I need the names of bands to listen to. I need album recommendations.

But I’m picky, I admit it. I don’t tend to like whiny alt-pop (especially the stuff that gets played OVER and OVER and OVER again on the local mix station). What I do like: soulful voices (especially female), bluegrass, acoustic guitar, lyrics that say something. I can take electronica in small doses. Too much screaming gives me a headache. Too much male angst drives me batty (hence my problem with the mix station stuff).

So here I am, admitting my weakness. I confess: I am a musical illiterate. Help me.