Ode to an iPod

How important is music in our lives?

My buddy Robert is 7,500 miles from home these days. It's not easy to get that far from family and friends, but there he is, in Abu Dhabi, working for a newspaper. That's what he does for a living, that's what many of us did before the world changed and our secure careers and futures vanished like newsprint in a flash fire.

Robert spent a year literally searching the world over for employment. Then it happened. One day he's sipping beers at The Albert, his favorite neighborhood haunt, the next thing you know he's editing stories in the Persian Gulf. What do you think that's been like?

Robert provides a glimpse in emails, text messages and occasional phone conversations, but I don't think it's possible to really know and understand his new world without being there. On thing, though, to which his note below attests. Music, the thread that holds us all together, is the baling wire in his survival kit.

Ode to the iPod

When you're feeling like a stranger in a strange land, when you feel
alone in the middle of city of a million and a half people and it
seems not one of them is the least little bit like you, there's
nothing that brings you home like music from home.

Not the popular classics from rock and roll, country and pop legends.
You might hear those anywhere here. There's something a little
unsettling about catching a ride from a toothless Pakistani cab driver
who's tapping his fingers to Sweet Home Alabama as he barrels down
Sheikh Zayed The First Street. (Nothing against toothless Pakistanis,
of course, or even Lynrd Skynrd, but ... well, you know what I'm
saying.)

But what really brings you home, what calms your fears and cools your
brow and eases your pain, is the music that's on your iPod, the music
you believe belongs only to you and that tight circle of friends, both
known and unknown, who share the same slightly-off-the-beaten-path
tastes.

Put the iPod on shuffle and let it flow, from Albert King to Lucinda
Williams to Fred Eaglesmith to Steve Earle to Shawn Mullins ... I
swear, when Pieta Brown launches into Sonic Boom, I don't know whether
to curl up and cry or jump up and dance ... to Blue Mountain to Kim
Richey to James McMurtry to Susan Tedeschi to Uncle Tupelo and on and
on, and after a while things don't seem so bad.

There's not much here to remind a lonely expat of home. But music
travels easy these days. Board a plane in Atlanta with an iPod Nano
tucked in your shirt pocket and a Logitech player in the corner of
your suitcase, and that's all it takes to bring a couple of thousand
of your favorite tunes halfway around the world. Thank heaven for
that.