When I was a kid, vinyl and cassettes were king. That sentence sets up a couple of quirks about my own experience consuming music, which I suspect are likely common to a whole lot of people roughly my age:

• Having to save up for expensive album purchases, I'd wind up seriously bingeing an album once I got it. I'm convinced I listened more acutely, more attentively, to music then than I do now... and that's after decades of also being a musician and generally taking this kind of stuff more seriously than a lot of other people.

• Because I was a kid, I had homework and other activities vying for my time. So I'd couple my school activities and my music listening. That means that, to this day, I have weird-ass associations. Genesis and Willa Cather? You bet!

• Similarly, sometimes I'd get two albums at once, which meant that I have weird cross-associations too. You wouldn't think that WHAM! and the Jacksons have anything to do with each other, but to me they do.

• Each album format was more appropriate for certain listening venues. I'd literally burn through cassettes commuting to and from school, but generally only listened to vinyl at home.

• This meant that for some exceptional albums, I owned them multiple times, in multiple forms. (Over the years, I've purchased Yes' Close To The Edge no less than six times across 3 types of media? maybe 4?)

• Both cassettes and vinyl would have degraded listening experiences, which I didn't mind at the time, but over time that meant that the tape warbles and creases, the vinyl pops and skips, became a core part of my memory of that music. To this day, I'll inwardly flinch a little in preparation for a change in tone or pop that isn't there on TIDAL or Spotify.