Repeat

The year was 1993, I had just turned 14, and I got my first boom box with a CD player. I was finally making the cross over from cassettes to CDs. Up until that fateful summer, I was all about the cassette tape. I had them organized in a shoe box by artist. There was the Amy Grant columns, the Michael W. Smith column, and my 3 well-loved DC Talk tapes. My first DC Talk CD (as I never did go back and replace Heavenbound, Nu Thang, and Free At Last with CDS...I still have those on tape) was this special remix CD with a special version of "The Hard Way." I was thrilled because this meant instead of listening to "The Hard Way" on the Free At Last tape and rewinding it over and over and over again to listen in order to listen to it 20 times (it always worked out great if the song I liked was the first song on either side because it was easy to rewind, sadly though, "The Hard Way" was song #2 on side 2), I could now pop in the CD and program the song to play over and over and over again. One day, one of my best friends, Dana, was over hanging out and she was a fellow DC Takk nut (we had big plans: we were going to go to Liberty University, because that's where they had gone, and then during our summer breaks, we were going to move to Nashville and get jobs and stalk Toby, Mike, and Kevin...too bad some dreams don't come true). So, I was in the process of popping in the CD and programming "The Hard Way" to play 20 times in a row. Dana started laughing and asked what in the world I was doing. So, I began to explain to her the beauty of CD players and how you can program one song to play over and over again. She then said, "Of course, I know that! But you don't program the song over and over, you simply use the REPEAT button!" I had seen the REPEAT button there on my boom box, but I didn't know what it was for. And then my life changed for the good. I learned how to utilize the REPEAT button for one song!

Since that day, I have put the REPEAT button to good use. There's usually that one song on a CD that completely knocks you down, suspends your heart beat and transcends time. "The Hard Way" was definitely one of those songs. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by the amount of CDs that I have, especially when I think about how I end up listening to the same ones over and over. And yet, I still want more. It's not that I think I waste money on CDs because I really only buy the ones that I really want and greatly anticipate coming out. There are a few impulse buys every now and then, for instance the Garden State Soundtrack and Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream that have been awesome additions to my collection.

All this to say, of the 4 new CDs that I have gotten very recently, here's what my repeat button is repeating for me:

Caedmon's Call: "Mother India" from Share the Well
Andrew Peterson: "Labor of Love" from Behold the Lamb (which is kind of unusual since it's a Jill Phillips song on an Andrew Peterson cd, but there's something about it that I love)
Relient K: "The One I'm Waiting For" from MmmmHmmm
Derek Webb: "I Want a Broken Heart" or "Nothing is Ever Enough" from I See Things Upside Down