Come Away With Me

This one's kind of embarrassing to admit, but he promised himself that he would go through this whole retrospective as truthfully and honestly as possible.  Having said that, the song he most remembers from 2003, and which brings the year back to him the most when he hears it, is Norah Jones' saccharine pop ballad Don't Know Why.

By no means was that all he listened to that year.  He was still downloading fast and furiously off of the internet, and he was still listening to Santa Monica's KCRW.  He attended some music event in what looks like Piedmont Park in April - possibly a 420 Fest - and took pictures of these performers, although he doesn't recognize any of them now:

The Music Midtown lineup for 2003 included Medeski, Martin, & Wood, Aimee Mann, Bob Dylan, Ben Harper, Buddy Guy, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Def Leppard, Godsmack, India.Arie, LL Cool J, Sheryl Crow, Tony Bennett, Ashanti, The B-52s, Drivin N Cryin, Edgar Winter, Everclear, G. Love & Special Sauce, the Isley Brothers, Jack Johnson, Les Claypool's Frog Brigade, Sixpence None The Richer, Steve Winwood, and Cracker (who he saw at the inaugural, 1994 festival), but once again, he didn't go, for all the same reasons that he didn't go in 2002.  Besides, he was busy having fun elsewhere doing other things that year.

He started dating a woman he had met tht year at the Zen Center, and they began an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted for the next couple of years.  One of her favorite CDs was Norah Jones' Come Away With Me, which she frequently played when he came over to visit and that record, and the song Don't Know Why in particular, became their sort of unofficial make-out music.  They even went and saw Jones perform in Atlanta's Chastain Park and even though they left early due to the monotonous nature of her set list, he was still aware of how far his musical tastes had transmorgified in the 15 years since he was listening to Ministry and Nine Inch Nails back in 1988 and '89.  Little did he know at the time, but the Norah Jones concert in Chastain Park would be the last live show he would go to for nearly six years.

In other news, he finally quit working for the environmental engineering company he had worked for since 1984, the firm that had taught him how to consult for a living, had moved him to upstate New York and to Pittsburgh and eventually back to Atlanta again.  Both he and the company had changed quite a bit over the decades since he had first joined, and by 2003 they were no longer a firm he would have joined - or who would have hired him for that matter.  

He took a new job that year opening an Atlanta office for a competitor at a substantial increase in pay, and to celebrate he and the new girlfriend took what turned out to be a disastrous trip to Corsica and Florence that only wound up leading to yet another one of their many breakups.  Despite the art and beauty and history all around them, instead of bonding them closer together, the challenges and tedium of international travel only wound up driving them further apart.  Instead of taking refuge in each others' company, they took their frustration and stress out on each other, and the experience only magnified and emphasized the differences in their personalities. 

But anyway, the point of all this is that while he's sure that there were a lot of interesting musical things going on back in 2003, he was more or less oblivious to most of them, and while in all honesty what he does remember is Norah Jones' Come Away With Me, it's not something he still listens to today and not because of its association with that ill-fated romance, but because laid-back, radio-friendly pop music wasn't really his thing back then and generally speaking still isn't now.