Sometimes everything sounds right, great, and it’s these moments I treasure.

Earlier this week I didn’t even want to turn on the stereo in my car.  But, on my way to the post office, after a therapy appointment today, everything sounded as if the deejay had picked the tracks just for me.

It started off with Duncan Sheik’s "The Dawn’s Request".  You can hear it at: duncansheik.  Why you also can’t hear the cut on Duncan’s homepage flummoxes me.  Not that it sounds so good streaming on MySpace.  Just imagine yourself in the Santa Monica haze with the sunroof open and the tunes FLOWING out of the speakers.  Maybe then you’ll get it.  I know his voice is somewhat affected, that it’s a bit of an acquired taste, but as the song progresses the instruments resonate.  He’s created a whole symphony.  In a pop world more akin to Phil Spector than Alan Parsons it rings true.  Music isn’t only to dance to, to be a member of a group with.  When done right, you need nobody else.  The music takes you into its bubble and you float away, with all your problems suddenly dissipated.

Then, after my stop I caught Peter Gabriel’s "Secret World".  To truly understand the studio version on "Us" one must listen to the double live album, where the track is extended and comes alive.  But the blueprint is in the original cut.  Remember when Peter Gabriel left the cushiness of Genesis and took us to a place we didn’t even know existed?  Never mind shocking the monkey, he shocked us too.  And it wasn’t the sledgehammer numbers that got to us, but the more left-field stuff like "Games Without Frontiers" and the sublime "Biko".

And pushing the buttons after "Secret World" ended I found Neil Young’s "Needle and the Damage Done".  Hey hey, my my, I like a good amount of Neil’s latter day stuff, but nothing competes with those first four albums.

I’ll admit I push the button when "Heart Of Gold" comes on.  But maybe the fact that "Needle and the Damage Done" was cut live keeps me listening.  It’s like a phone call from an old friend.  One who took the road less traveled.  You were so close back then, and even though you hardly speak anymore, when you do, you lock right in.

As I approached my house I contemplated what I’d lost.  The innocence of youth, the hope.  I wanted that back.  Oh, to be nineteen again would suck.  But in 1972, my life was still completely ahead of me.  And music was still not the mainstream, but the secret world of the enlightened.  Then again, maybe the mainstream success of "Harvest" was the end of the era, maybe this is why Neil went on the road and played new electric tunes, to push the casual fans away.  He wasn’t playing for these people, but the believers.

I’m not sure I still believe.  In an era where music is something you enjoy in the car, where you possess a stereo far eclipsing the one in your home.  Then again, a car is a bubble.  And in a world that bombards you with more messages than you can comprehend the bubble is so appealing.