I love me some new Barenaked Ladies tunes! The single (do they call them that anymore) is an Ed tune. Drool!
And 3 songs for only .99, such a deal!
Tuesday was always my favorite day from about 1984 when I got my first car, til about 1998 when I left my job at the “record” store. When I first got my car, I would drive to the Strawberries in Nashua, NH every Tuesday after school to see what new records were in. I even remember making my mother drive me down that Tuesday in 1983 when the Police’s Synchronicity was released, before I had my licence.
After high school, I quit my job at the local supermarket when a new mall opened and I got offered a job at the record store. The manager was a wonderful guy who taught me so much about music and introduced me to artists that are still my favorites today, like Kate Bush and the Jam, and was filled will all the useless liner notes and other trivia that only a music geek would know.
When I went off to college, my boss had me transferred to the store in downtown Boston, and the manager there was almost as cool as the previous one, but was so stressed out he was thrilled to have me there so he could finally have a day off. He left the store in my hands and went away for the weekend, and the next night the store was robbed and I was held up at gunpoint and tied up in the back of the store with some of the other employees. Quite an adventure! I kept working at the store throughout college, then moved to California and the chain didn’t have any stores close to where I was living, so I went to work at the rival chain. I didn’t last there long – their style wasn’t like mine so I didn’t fit in. A few months later, I had a day job, but decided to apply at another local chain for my music fix. I worked there for 6 years until I met my soon to be husband and needed more free time than cash and left that job.
I loved Tuesdays. It was like you got a Christmas or Birthday every week. Each Monday night or Tuesday morning you would open all the boxes full of new releases, prepare the end caps for the new releases, and sticker everything to put out first thing the next morning, or depending on the workload during the day, we could start putting stuff out after closing the store. I loved walking the aisles with a pile of CDs on my arm sliding them into their slots, getting out the DYMO for creating new cards for new artists or artists that hadn’t had anything in the store for a while.
Even if there wasn’t anything in the boxes that appealed to me, I still learned so much about artists or bands that I didn’t know, which makes me a killer player on any kind of music trivia game, as long as it’s 1999 or earlier, that is. I guess there’s a musical stunting when we reach the end of the time when we are psyched about music and just become regular normal consumers. After I stopped working at the store, I lost track of what’s new and only began to hear about music from other bands, web sites, newsgroups, listservs, etc.
I get the iTunes new music Tuesday emails. It’s not the same as cracking the tape on the box of CDs on Monday and putting aside the CD to be bought on Tuesday, opening the jewel box and pulling out the liner notes and looking for people you know, the inside jokes that you wonder if you know the meaning of, the guest artists who have shown up. Nothing has been able to replace that yet.
On a related note, anyone out there remember looking for secret messages around the label on LPs? The Clash had some good ones, and Adam and the Ants. Any others you can think of?