The Scent of New CDs

Is it just me, or do new CDs smell like corn chips? I bought two new CDs on Monday, Aja by Steely Dan and "The Essential Concrete Blonde".

Aja is my favorite Steely Dan album. I don't think I can emphasize enough how important this album was to my teenage psyche, listening to purloined tapes from my father's collection. No 14-year-old in history, after all, has ever bought a Steely Dan record. And especially not in 1991. The music on Aja was so beautiful and haunting to my young ears, and I loved its strange left turns. Yet it's fun and groovy. The lyrics implied this intellectual, edgy and somewhat seedy world. It was a great comfort to a me to realize that bourgeois notions of respectability didn't have to figure in my life at all. And I think I might have put it that way at the time, too.

I should not have bought the "The Essential Concrete Blonde," because the Concrete Blonde compilation "Recollection" has a much better track listing, including "Everybody Knows" and "Ghost of Texas Ladies Man." The Essential apparently is a remastered set of songs, and is very heavy on the "Bloodletting" tracks (excluding, oddly, the song "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)"). I find this strange because even the casual Concrete Blonde fan, which I am, seems to be more likely to have the album "Bloodletting" than any of their others. I may try to get rid of this new Concrete Blonde CD on Half.com, and order a copy Recollection (unless someone wants this?). I actually already own a used copy of Recollection, but it was so badly scratched that it barely plays at all in my computer.