I spent a lot of time during my high school years listening to music. And I still listen to a lot of music, all through the day — but I mean really listening to music.

I would take the time to sit down and just listen to an album. Just sit alone, sometimes open up a lyric sheet (it helps me to see the lyrics and the progression and structure of things… I don’t know if I’m weird or if everyone is like that) and listen, just focusing on that.

I’ve missed doing that. I often find myself with music on, treating it as sort-of-but-not-entirely-background music, when I will focus on it for a few moments and think, “Wow, that sounds really, really great. I need to really listen to that sometime.”

(You know how occasionally, you can just tell that that recording/film/painting/article/newspaper comic/computer program/whatever that you’re only moderately aware of is a masterpiece, even when you haven’t really given it the attention it demands? Sometimes, on further inspection, you realize you were wrong; but it seems that, on average, one’s sub-conscious does a decent job of quality discernment.)

Anyway, I’ve got more than a handful of albums to which I’ve thought before that I owed an actual “serious listen”. I’ll be doing that more over the next few weeks: I started tonight with Radiohead’s Amnesiac. And listening — really listening — is just as enjoyable as it ever was.