Undeletable

One last, short entry for the day. As I was driving home from work this evening, I was listening to shuffled tracks on my iPod. Patti Griffin's "Mother Of God" came up followed immediately by Gillian Welch's "Everything Is Free," and it occurred to me: I cannot conceive of deleting Griffin's Silver Bell or Welch's Time (The Revelator) from my iPod.

Now, the thing that's kind of funny and strange is--how do I put this? I love, no, I adore both of these records, and yet they wouldn't necessarily leap into my brain as favorite albums or "desert island" albums or any of that. I love Ms. Griffin and Ms. Bell, and yet (due to inertia and neglect) these just happen to be the only albums I own by these two artists (and one is a bootleg of a woefully unreleased masterpiece--I have a ton of Patti Griffin albums on my shopping list now, and I just haven't gotten to any of them yet). Despite my admiration of both artists, they're not necessarily the first to leap to mind as favorites the way Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Michael Penn, Sigur Rós, U2 or Bruce Springsteen leap to mind.

And yet, in spite of all of that, I realized on the way home tonight that I just can't imagine ever not having those two albums on my iPod. Deleting American Doll Posse from my iPod is certainly easy to imagine--matter of fact, I should probably do that soon, and maybe put some Go-Gos and Dick Dale on there. I'm not sure I have any U2 or Smiths on the iPod, despite the fact that The Edge and Marr mean a lot to me as guitarists. And I had an ironic exchange with a coworker who also happens to be seeing The Boss this coming Sunday over the fact that I recently swapped out the Springsteen bootleg I had on my iPod as part of putting a whole bunch of Bowie on it after going to a Bowie tribute/AIDS benefit with friends a couple of weeks ago. I.e. no Springsteen on my iPod despite being a devotee.

So here's the question, if anyone wants to discuss it (this feels weird--I'm so used to just ranting; asking for replies feels dirty somehow, like I'm trolling): are there albums on your iPod (or similar digital-music-portable-device) that you just can't even dream of deleting? "What's on your iPod?" is an awfully conventional question. So I'm not asking. The question is do you have anything that you can't delete on your iPod? It might not even be your favorite album or artist, simply something that would ache if you tried to remove it.