Stephen Mejias

Look: I mean, listen: I mean, look: I'm the sort of guy who is comfortable with the idea that there's more than just music to this whole hi-fi thing. It's not all about the music. That's bullshit. It's also about friendship and peace and art and beauty. It's about belonging. You can get into hi-fi even if you don't listen to music. What? Yes! It's about getting drunk and high and lost. It's about girls and boys. It's also about the gear. But you can get into hi-fi even if you don't like gear. What? Yes! It's about more than just what the gear does. It's also about how the gear looks when it does what it does. Hi-fi is a full-on sensory attack, a blissed-out mind-fuck, an ocean, a sky, a lion in the tall, yellow grass. We feel with our heads and our hearts, with our ears and our eyes and every little bit of our little human selves.

In the conference room, where I have lunch each day with two of my favorite people in the world (I am very lucky), I found myself tapping my fingers in constant rhythm against the long, veneered table. Why was I doing this?

That first morning, I woke and immediately began to worry. How would I know what to wear? What if there were train delays? What if there had been some horrible catastrophe requiring that I stay away from Manhattan?

If you were to do a Google image search on my work at Stereophile, you'd see that, basically, my days are simply filled with reading, writing, coordinating, and planning. No two consecutive days, however, are the same.

Lately, when I’ve been hungry for some good, uncomplicated, headshaking, soul-lifting songwriting, the kind that drops from the summer sky like a sudden shower and leaves a rainbow in its wake, I’ve turned to Slave Ambient, the sophomore release from The War On Drugs.

Recorded over the last four years in front man Adam Granduciel’s home studio in Philadelphia, Jeff Ziegler’s Uniform Recording, and Echo Mountain in Asheville, NC, the album is a drive to the ocean, windows down, head back, shades on. Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, drums, and Granduciel’s voice, rambling and drifting and howling, together recalling heat waves, long days, Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Adams, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Okay, read this: The">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121023882">The Decade in Music: The Way We Listen Now, from NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Have you read thathttp://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/the_way_we_listen_now/">that<…;, yet? Okay, now read this: “Reconsidering">http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/116282-reconsidering-the-revival-o… the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture,” by PopMatters’ Calum Marsh.