So perhaps a new beginning isn’t about becoming somebody else. Maybe it is about giving ourselves permission to do something differently. That is where I think these cycles we create and give meaning to are useful.
What I think is remarkable about music: it reaches across families, generation, countries, culture, age, and of course languages.
our film may be 24 exposures, or sometimes 36. And if you were going on vacation, you had to think about it. How much film do I bring? Do I have enough? Do I want to waste a picture? Because once you took it, you can’t go back and erase it. You were done. Then came the big change. Five or six days of waiting for your photos to come back turned into 24 hours developing. And then came the one-hour photo. One hour, can you imagine? We thought that was incredible.
Because we all have Sirens: temptation. It could be alcohol. It might be drugs. It might be porn. It might be a relationship that you know is bad for you. It might be money, gambling, attention, power, or simply the feeling of constantly needing to be desired. The Siren is anything that sounds so good in the moment that makes you forget what you already know.
Watching those children waiting for the school bus, each one holding a phone with their parents right beside them, I start thinking about how much freedom we had when we were
8 and 9 years old.
People ask me why I collect them, and the truth is, I don’t think I’m collecting radios. I think I’m collecting sort of stories, the story behind the radio.