After ghosting Spotify for 60 days to revisit my ’90s-’00s CD collection, I discovered that physical media is more than a nostalgia trip—it’s a necessary “slow tech” tool for reclaiming focus from the algorithm.
It was the fall of 1993.
I was standing in the late, great Tower Records on the southeast corner of East 4th Street—that glorious temple of discovery—holding Porno for Pyros’ debut in one hand and Dinosaur Jr.’s Where You Been in the other. I had exactly seventeen dollars and change in my pocket. As a high school student, I could afford one CD, a slice of Ray’s pizza and $1.25 on my shiny new Metrocard for the F train home.
I dropped both discs and went with Gentlemen by The Afghan Whigs
That disc should have paid rent to live in my Yorx stereo.
Fast forward to last month. I looked at my Spotify Wrapped and realized I couldn’t remember a single album I’d listened to front-to-back. It was just a digital blur of algorithm-approved indie “vibes” and Discover Weekly tracks I half-heard while writing fiction.
So, I did something impulsive. I pulled the plug. I canceled the subscriptions and sentenced myself to thirty days with nothing but the CD tower—the one with the Z100 sticker my neighbor charitably gave me when he couldn’t unload it at a garage sale.
I’ve been thinking about tossing it recently.
Turns out, it’s not ready for the trash just yet. And neither are the discs.
What I Gave Away for Love
Before I tell you about my month with the CDs, I need to confess something.
My tower used to be a wall. Thousands of discs. Pavement, Sebadoh, Jawbreaker, Built to Spill—the complete mid-90s indie canon. Every disc had a story. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin taught me that “My childhood inspection / Is my record collection.”
Then, in 2001, I found a guy on Craigslist under “Items Wanted.”
He was buying CDs. A dollar each. Any condition. He didn’t care if the case was cracked or the booklet was missing or you’d written your name on the disc in Sharpie. Cash, no questions asked.
I sold him a few thousand discs.
He told me, and I don’t know if this was true or just a story to make me feel better about what I was doing, that he shipped them in containers to Eastern Europe. They’d end up on college campuses in Prague or Budapest, selling for several dollars each to kids who couldn’t afford to import American CDs legally.
The money went toward an engagement ring.
I wish I had an inventory of what I gave up. The EP I bought because the cover art looked cool? The promo disc someone handed me outside CBGBs? The Japanese import of The Replacements’ Tim with the bonus tracks?
Gone. All of it. Probably sitting in a crate in Krakow, or scratched to hell, or in a landfill.
The engagement worked out quite well.
But the CDs? Those are gone forever.
So when I talk about my “collection,” understand: this is the survivors. The 2% that made it through the Great Purge. The discs I couldn’t bring myself to part with, or the ones I’ve slowly replaced over the years when I see them in a dollar bin.
It’s not the library I had. But it’s the one I’ve got.
The Ritual of the Tray
Here’s what the algorithm can’t replicate: the three seconds it takes to slide a CD out of the teeth of a jewel case, place it on the tray and hear that mechanical whir as the laser finds its place.
When I pull out the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream—purchased at an HMV at a Long Island strip mall that is now, inevitably, a doctor’s office- the memories hit me like a slap on the face. I remember that summer squatting at Eran’s house, not understanding how music can be so beautifully quiet and aggressively abrupt at the same time.
We Gen Xers tend to pretend we’re above the nostalgia trap, but we’re the biggest suckers for a physical connection to who we used to be.
An Archaeological Dig in the Basement
My CD tower, while 98% slimmer than it was in its prime, is still a stratigraphic map of my teens. There’s Live’s Throwing Copper wedged against Belly’s Star. Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Dulcinea next to one of my all-time faves, Black Market Flower’s Bind.
Then I spotted Gwen Mars’ Magnosheen and Smile’s Maquee.
Two albums I’d completely forgotten about. For whatever reason, they never cracked the Spotify algorithm. I remembered buying both after previewing them at a listening station, headphones on, thinking “This is the next big thing!”
Down the rack, Brad’s Shame. Stone Gossard’s Pearl Jam side project that nobody talks about but everyone who knows, knows. I pulled it out just to see if it held up.
It did. More than held up, actually. It reminded me that streaming’s algorithm would never serve me Brad. Too obscure, too specific, too much of a “you had to be there” kind of band. But I was there. And now I’m here again.
Streaming services are great at telling you what you should like based on math. But it rarely surprises you with your own past. It just feeds you more of your present. Or more of your past present, if that makes sense.
The Beauty of the Scratch
I know the tech specs. I’m a “slow tech” guy. I know Spotify’s high-bitrate setting is “basically” CD quality. But my CDs don’t buffer. They don’t cut out because the Wi-Fi is acting up. They don’t suddenly swap to a “clean radio edit” because of a licensing dispute. That might be the worst part of the whole streaming prison
When I popped in Candlebox’s self-titled debut, I got the version I bought in 1993. No “30th Anniversary Remaster,” no bloated bonus tracks, no digital “fixing” of the levels. Just the raw, scratched-up reliability of a format that has been on life support for years. “Far Behind” brings me faaaaar behind, all the way back to high school. Shit, I remember when Madonna signed them to Maverick Records. They were so hyped, and somehow, impossibly, they lived up to it. In an era of “everything as a service,” owning a CD feels like a quiet act of rebellion. And we GenXers eat that shit up.
Slowing Down
Look, I’m not going to romanticize this into some kind of “reject modernity, embrace tradition” manifesto. Because the truth is, living with only CDs in 2026 is a pain in the ass. Portability is a joke, and these things skip if you sneeze or cough. Cough and sneeze at the same time? Forget about it!
Streaming won’t skip when you run (OK, jog). Streaming has every Goo Goo Dolls album ever made, plus B-sides, plus that weird cover they did of “Never Take the Place of Your Man.”
Am I quitting streaming? Hell no. The convenience and selection are too great to defeat. Can’t we all just get along? But I’ve learned to love the intentional ritual of using CDs when I’m writing. Or on the elliptical. Or throwing in a load of laundry. How punk rock is that!
I’ve been obsessing lately about slowing down my brain. Self-diagnosed ADHD. A million notes with stray quotes and productivity hacks. Doing 10 things at once while thinking of 10 more.
Am I cured after a month with CDs? No, but it has opened my eyes wider than Alex’s in A Clockwork Orange. Physical media demands intentionality. You have to choose one disc. You have to remove it from the case. You have to commit to it for at least 45 minutes.
It’s a choice.
Owning something real, something finite, something I can hold in my hands might be exactly what my scattered brain needs.
The world says we should embrace the algorithm and trust it to know what we want better than we do. But there’s no predictive formula in the world that knows I’m in the mood to blast Dig’s Believe followed by Nelson’s After the Rain. Well, I want to. And I will. Now, where did I put that damn CD?
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