For years, I’ve asked my husband to ditch his CD collection. Then I sifted through it

Sitting in our attic is a cardboard box of CDs that I have been trying to get rid of for years.

The CDs actually belong to my husband – I gave away my own CD collection when we moved into our house 12 years ago.

My husband’s CD collection. Credit: Cara Waters

At the time, op shops still took CD collections, so I felt that temporary warm glow you get when you donate something. I’m pretty sure most don’t accept them anymore.

The problem is that while I try my best to adopt a Marie Kondo approach to possessions, weighing up whether they are ever used, let alone spark joy, my husband is a hoarder from way back.

He is still upset about his mum throwing out his favourite pair of tracksuit pants 25 years ago.

So it didn’t entirely surprise me that 12 years ago, he wanted to hang onto his CD collection, carefully packed away in a cardboard box.

We had already moved on to listening to music on iPods, and streaming services were just around the corner, but he was adamant that the CD collection remained “just in case”.

We don’t even have a CD player.

I tried again more recently when we were cleaning out old toys and books for the kids’ school fete in a fit of decluttering energy.

The school fete wouldn’t want the old CDs, but I figured this could be the impetus to get them out of the house.

I dragged the cardboard box down the ladder from the attic and had a sift through its contents.

Some of the plastic CD cases were cracked and yellowed with time, and some of the CDs themselves looked scratched and battered or were missing covers. This was no pristine collection.

They would have no monetary value, but going through the contents of the box I felt a wave of nostalgia wash over me for the music of our youth.

Sitting on top were CDs from Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, Faithless, Damien Rice and, more randomly, the 12th Man’s Wired World of Sports.

Picking each one up, I could almost hear the opening riffs of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I was transported straight back to a time when every summer rang out to the catchcry of “Maaarvelous”.

Wedged in between the CDs was a real archeological timepiece: a Sony CD Walkman which promised on a sticker both FM and AM radio and 40 hours of listening.

Turns out we did have a CD player after all.

Sifting further through the box, I found Pearl Jam’s entire album output from Ten to Yield, including the distinctive cardboard black-covered Vitalogy with its gold trim, along with various Radiohead albums and Gomez’s Liquid Skin.

Australian music was well represented including The Whitlams’ Love This City, Silverchair’s debut Frogstomp, Cold Chisel and Icehouse “best ofs” and Midnight Oil’s entire collection.

This box was a time capsule of my husband’s musical tastes from his teenage years through to when we met and discovered new bands together.

Begrudgingly, I had to admit a certain nostalgia for the CDs of the ’90s and early 2000s, a time when your entire musical collection could be contained in a cardboard box.

Back then, we listened to the same CDs over and over on repeat until we knew every word to every song off by heart.

We listened to entire albums from end to end rather than just cherry-picking songs fed to us by an algorithm.

We were Generation X so we didn’t have a vinyl collection that would actually be cool and a collector’s item now.

Instead, we were the generation who started out listening to music on tapes, then switched to CDs and now pay a monthly fee to listen to that same music on Spotify.

The CDs were expensive, cumbersome and they eventually got scratched or broken, but there was still something a little magical about these physical manifestations of music and the memories they brought back.

So I returned the box to the attic.

Marriages involve compromise. I sometimes fear that the amount of stuff in our attic is so much that our ceiling will collapse on top of us in our sleep, but I have given up harassing my husband about his CD collection.

The CDs remain tucked away in the attic in their cardboard box, a relic and reminder of another time.

Cara Waters is The Age’s city editor.

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