Little House He Used to Live In

In 1990, he finally broke down and bought a CD player, and began the long process of reacquiring his library of LPs and cassettes in disc form.  His inclination toward industrial and post-rock music began to be tempered somewhat by listening again to a lot of his earlier music in the new CD format, and also by the shimmering sounds of  a new generation of melodic rock bands, including Glasgow's Del Amitri and London's The Sundays.  Slowly, he backed down from the ledge of extreme music and back to appreciating somewhat more human - and humane - sounds.  

To this day, he still considers The Sunday's first two albums, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic and Blind, to be timeless classics that he can (and does) still enjoy anytime he hears them.  It never gets old for him.  He's fascinated by the sound David Gavurin gets from his guitar as well as by Harriet Wheeler's vocals. How could a voice that sounded so sweet sing such mean-spirited lyrics? "If I could have anything in the world for free, I wouldn't share it with anyone else but me" she sings in A Certain Someone, and "Just give me an easy life and a peaceful death" in Goodbye.  The lyrics might be considered downbeat to some, but anything less would have sounded too saccharin sweet for his still lingering pessimism, that "little souvenir of a terrible year" (Here's Where The Story Ends). 

Also, a full two decades before the current enthusiasm for alternative housing, he rented a small, barely converted barn out in the New York countryside and made his home there.  The barn notably had the Ben and Jerry's logo painted on its side, and the deal included a chicken coop (although he allowed the chickens to range freely around the property), a vegetable garden, a couple outbuildings for storing firewood, etc., and even an in-ground swimming pool. The owners' black lab would stop by from time to time to keep an eye on things, but otherwise he pretty much had the run of the place.

Autumn, spring, and summer were pretty sweet, but the long New York winters were harsh and he only had a single wood-burning stove for warmth.  But he was only a mere mile away from the old Erie Canal, and once it froze over, he could ice-skate along it for miles on end.

Listening to The Sundays, things didn't seem quite so bad to him after all.  With the 80s now finally behind him, their trauma and heartbreak and melancholia finally over, he was emerging out of the darkness and back into the light.