I’ll be honest. I’ve been so swamped lately, I don’t really have the time/energy to write an informative column.

Instead, this one’s going to be all about me. One of the reasons I’ve been swamped with work is the three pieces on Swans I have in the works for this site. I’m reviewing the new album (coming soon!), I recently interviewed Michael Gira and am currently in the process of transcribing/editing the interview, and I will be reviewing the two New York Swans shows in October. So naturally, all of my music journalism energies and attention is focused on Swans. So all I could think to write for this week’s column was about how I first discovered Swans. So that makes four pieces about Swans within about a month.

Sorry.

But for those of you who can’t stand Swans or are totally indifferent to their music (but how could such music ever provoke indifference?), please bear with me for a few more paragraphs; this piece is about more than Swans. I have space to talk about how much I love their music elsewhere. Instead, I’m writing to mourn an era of music that is most likely dead for all of us.

But to get to that point, I need to tell you about the first time I ever listened to Swans as a sophomore in high-school. It’s common for music discovered in high-school to resonate deeply, and Swans for me is no exception. This particular moment included some big transitions: I was just learning to drive well enough to go places on my own, I was transitioning social circles, and at this particular moment, I didn’t really have any friends to speak of. It was spring, and I was finishing my last season on the track team. This would be the last time I ever competed in a sporting event. This was also 1997 and it would be the last year that I lived without access to the internet. Looking back, I don’t know what I did with most of my time that year, but I’m pretty sure most of it was spent alone.

I do know that I spent a fair amount of time browsing the shelves of Borders. Back then, Borders wasn’t a bad place to discover music. Their selection was probably five times what it is today, and independent artists with small audiences like Swans were not foreign to their shelves. That’s where I first discovered Swans. Just sitting there. There was no display or listening station. Just the few albums of Swans’ Borders managed to stock sitting there among the rest of their merchandise as if they were any other band.

Soundtracks for the Blind is what caught my attention, and the first Swans album I purchased. These days it’s sold in a 2CD jewel case, but at the time it was in a very nice looking cardboard packaging that looked more substantial and interesting. The silver and bronze circles on the front and back had a glossy sheen. On the back side, the track listings and lengths were neatly printed.

I had no idea what the band sounded like. All I knew was that they were distributed at the time by Thirsty Ear, who also distributed albums by Bedhead, a group I was just beginning to enjoy at the time. I knew that the album itself came in neat packaging, the band’s name was pretty cool and that the album consisted of tracks of widely varying lengths – the longest track was more than fifteen minutes long, and the shortest was less than two minutes (At that time, long songs intrigued me). And that was basically all of my knowledge about Swans and Soundtracks for the Blind at the time I purchased the album.

To anyone today, this would clearly be horribly insufficient information to base a musical purchase on, but at the time, it was all I had to go on. I didn’t have internet access at home, and didn’t have any easy access to it anywhere else, so I didn’t think to look them up on the internet. Google and googling didn’t exist. I’d never heard of MP3s (and neither had most people). I either had to take the plunge and buy the album or continue to wonder what the hell this mysterious band sounded like. Finally, I got sick of wondering and bought the album.

And if I was buying the album for answers, the joke was on me. The interior of the album included no pictures of the band and the names of the two sole songwriters “Gira” and “Jarboe” told me nothing about the authors behind the album. And Jarboe’s vocal delivery in “Yum Yab Killers” was so rough and brutal that I briefly thought she was a man. But this only added to the mystery and depth that the music had for me.

The music was like nothing I had ever heard before. “Helpless Child” was a sprawling epic, packed with drones, brooding vocals and lyrics and a final instrumental closing that was both punishing and beautiful. It was almost instantly one of my favorite songs. But half of the album also consisted of spoken word and noise pieces that I was totally unprepared for. It would take me years to be able to enjoy the album in its entirety. Today, it ranks as probably my favorite studio album of all time, and no musical work has ever excited me the way that Swans are Dead did that first day that I purchased it.

And nothing ever will.

I think it’s safe to say that I will never again buy an album without any clue as to what the band looks or sounds like. These days, all you have to do is type a band’s name into Google, and you can usually come up with some pictures, their webpage, reviews and maybe even some sample tracks. Allmusic.com can usually tell you everything you need to know about a band’s history and discography. Borders’ decided long ago to cease being a place of musical discovery. But even the independent record stores increasingly have less to offer their customers.

There’s a lot to celebrate about the digital age for music. No longer is our access to music limited to our friend’s collections and the selections of our local music stores. Hell, it doesn’t even matter anymore if an album’s out of print; it can still be found somewhere on the internet. But every time I’ve stepped in a music store for the last several months, I’ve found myself increasingly disappointed. Maybe it’s just that getting older means getting less excited about new music….But the fact that music stores – both large and small — have been going out of business seems to show that I’m not the only one finding less reward from music stores.

For those of us who aren’t vinyl-philes, the days when we can engage with musical works as physical products to enjoy and treasure are either disappearing or they’re entirely gone. I know a lot of people rail against downloading and the internet for what they’ve done to musician’s lives and music stores all over the country. But I just can’t get worked up about that. Change is inevitable in every industry. No profession can expect to do the same thing forever. But I do think there is something to mourn when music is no longer mysterious, sacred and exciting, and is instead as disposable as junk email.