Species | Bing & Ruth

Don’t forget to listen while you read!

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Let me preface by saying that I do think Bing & Ruth is really a phenomenal group. If you dig this, and aren’t familiar with some of their other albums, I can’t recommend them more highly. I don’t really once mention if I even like this music in what I wrote down below, so at least let it go on record that I, in fact, sincerely do.

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The thing about Species is that I own it on vinyl, which in and of itself isn’t anything to get to worked up over. But, one way or another, physical media like records has this weird way of changing the occasions on which you’ll listen to something. When it’s not just a matter of “blue-toothing” or streaming, the music you choose to listen to is a bit more purposeful. And, as it happened, I had one very specific set of circumstances that I chose to satisfy when I went to listen to this album, every time, without fail.

So now, for me, when I listen to “Body in a Room,” the first track, I am brought back to every single time I sat on my couch in the dark, with a single candle on the coffee table, during some chilly autumn night, staring at the flame. I got the album sometime in September or October, and after one time putting it on and ‘vibing,’ I just sort of assigned that role to this album.

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And then so now the weird thing is: this whole tracklist has become some strange kind of sacred to me. Because, every time I listen to it, it reminds me of those nights, and those were nights I really liked. And, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t know that I’ve ever had any single track, let alone entire album, so strongly given some sort of concrete association like the one that organically grew here.

But then now the weird thing is that I don’t want to let that go. I don’t want to listen to this in the car, or on a run, or any other time, for fear that the association will waver, or something. That, after enough listens, that association will be diluted, so to speak.

And the real pickle comes in when I think about the fact that, at least as I see it now, I won’t have another chance to imprint the ‘correct’ memory with this music again. If you haven’t already heard, I won’t be in New Jersey again for at least a few years. And I’ll be leaving in August, well before we experience any sort of autumnal weather. So now I’m faced with the fact that, whenever the last time I let this record play by candlelight on a particularly chilly night, well: that was the last time I was going to get to do that. At least in the environment it all began in, and that’s one I already know I’m going to miss like hell in no time.

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So now, you tell me: do I never listen to this music again until I’m virtually on my deathbed, so that the untainted memories of my first experience with this music in my mid-twenties flood back to me in what’s gotta be the most rewarding nostalgia hit of all time? (But not, then, for basically most of my life.)

Or do I continue to listen regularly, slowly losing clarity on what this music once stood for in my heart and mind, until it becomes less a marker of a time and place I held sacred, and more a marker of the very act of failing to hold on to something that’s insisting on slipping away?