It’s a weird thing, this idea that one “owns” music. It’d be really simple to make the argument that no one really OWNS music, even the artist. I honestly don’t think “owns” is the right verb, though.
For as much as I love music, I’ve probably only ever “owned” less than 1000 physical pieces of music in total, if I include 45s, LPs, cassettes (including those recorded off the radio – shout out to WMMS), and then CDs. They all contained varying degrees of meaning to me (I mean, come on, how much meaning can a 45 of C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” really have?), and the practical concern is that they accumulate. In the pre-digital age, kids, music was a pain in the ass to collect. The media are big and heavy, and they are annoying at best to have to move from one coast to the Midwest to another coast back to the original coast. So, over time, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve ditched most of them – first the vinyl and cassettes, then more recently most of the CDs, although I’ve kept a couple that are important to me. One’s here:
I bought this at Cheap Thrills Records, in New Brunswick, a million and a half years ago or so (1988?), because a guy whose musical tastes I respected a lot told me I needed to listen to this. And I did and he was right and I have never lost my love of this album. Of everything I’ve ever heard, what Scott Miller and company did on this album back in the late 1980s has probably meant more to me than anything else, musically.
I don’t know if I get to say that I “own” this piece of music, though. I thought of it more as a gift from the group when I bought it, and I keep it not because it’s “mine” in some abstract sense, but because it’s meaningful to me. I can mentally listen to this album even when it’s physically 30 miles or 300 miles away from me. I think I’ve picked out just about every production filip and filigree that Mitch Easter put onto it. I once wanted to learn more about the LISP programming language because of Song 22 on the CD (title too long to include here). I want to have “Last Day That We’re Young” played when they’re sprinkling my ashes around wherever that is.
But to say that I “own” this? No. I don’t think that gets at what I really feel about it, because Scott Miller, a tremendously talented and un(der)appreciated songwriter, committed suicide at the age of 53 in April, 2013, after years of critical praise and vanishingly small actual sales. To say that I “own” a work of his seems, well, unseemly.
53’s not old. He’d been recording, he’d been playing, he had a family, he had a job, he had a little girl. That’s the tragedy of it, as all such tragedies are. The tragedy isn’t “this talented musician can’t make music any more”, it’s the effect of what he did on the people closest to him.
But before he chose to leave, he and the band gave this album to me and anyone else who might appreciate it. It was a gift. You don’t “own” gifts. You receive them.
Big difference.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be thinking about Scott Miller when I turn 53 soon enough, and the gift he gave me. And I’ll wish that he could somehow know how much his work has meant to me since the last day I was young.