Half a year or so into my American immigrant life, I earned enough money through a couple of small jobs to splurge on my very own CD-playing boombox. Lured in by the infamous “12 CDs for the price of 1” offer, I then joined BMG Music Service (which I accidentally learned is ceasing operation this month) with the aim of building up my music collection.
I bought a lot of dreck through that service (remember, this was before the era of peer-to-peer internet sharing, so I had little opportunity to “try before you buy”). Some albums and performers aligned with this or that fleeting “phase” in my musical affinities. Others were recommended by enthusiastic friends whose tastes not always ran parallel to mine. Yet others were of the “one hit track plus thirteen crappy ones” variety, where I just had to have that hit track.
I eventually offloaded dozens of barely-used CDs to second-hand music shops for $2 apiece. That’s several hundred dollars of money down the drain…
Buying an album of Enya was one of those “recommended by a friend” purchases. Not even a close friend, as it were, but one of my fellow counselors at a summer day camp. Whom I don’t think I saw ever again or cared to keep in touch with after the camp had ended.
I never managed to get into Enya’s New Age sound and probably never listened to that album more than a couple of times. But Caribbean Blue somehow stuck out, and it is now one of the few musical “survivors” from that period of my life. I have it in my iPod library, and when it comes up in shuffle mode, I normally don’t skip through it.
I like the video a lot, too.
