I’m always pleasantly surprised by what I consider to be simple yet thoughtful gifts. The most thoughtful gift I received this Christmas was a CD.

Six years ago, that idea might not have made any sense. CDs make fairly pedestrian gifts. Personalized mix tapes could easily be considered to be more thoughtful.  But with technology being what it is, purchasing a physical copy of an album, running your hands over it, appreciating its artwork and reading every word written along with the lyrics in the insert seems novel and redundant when we can so easily download music for free.

I haven’t purchased a CD since the summer before my junior year of high school. I think I bought four CDs that day: Rufio’s ‘Perhaps, I Suppose,’ Taking Back Sunday’s ‘Tell All Your Friends’ and ‘Where You Want To Be’ as well as Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’. The last was a gift for my mother, who had recently told me that ‘Tapestry’ was the first vinyl she ever bought, and that she listened to it until it wouldn’t play anymore. As a selfish 16-year-old, I figured randomly buying her that CD made for a pretty thoughtful gift. Tell me I’m not a good daughter.

The Christmas gift was Fleet Foxes’ self-titled album. Yes, my musical taste has matured some since the days of my angsty obsession with Taking Back Sunday. Fleet Foxes is fairly new to the music scene as well. The band barely existed when I was in high school — which is strange and oddly indulgent for me to think about, since the two boys who started the band (Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset) are not even two years older than me and went to high school in a neighboring town in the same district as mine.

After picking up on Fleet Foxes early in the fall of 2009, I very quickly and intensely became a religious and somewhat fanatic follower.  My iTunes holds every song they’ve ever released and, for the most part, I love them all. I love Pecknold’s voice and the way listening to  ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’ makes me feel when I’m driving across the semi-desolate corridor of I-5 from Seattle to Corvallis (something I do with great regularity). After a late-night Wikipedia search which led to discovering how close in physical proximity the founders of Fleet Foxes were to me during their formative days, I bonded with the band even more.

During my senior year, I participated in a student exchange with Lake Washington High School, the very school Pecknold and Skjelset graduated from just two years earlier. I have walked the same halls as they have and sat in the same classrooms they sat in. Had either of them been runners, I would have seen them every week at cross country and track meets during the fall and spring. The idea that we may have hung out at the same 24-hour Starbucks, partied at the Hell House when it was still standing and ate at the Ranch Drive-In completely blows my mind, for lack of a better term.

When I opened up the CD for the first time and read the insert (which contained a page of thanks but no lyrics), it was like having an intimate conversation with Pecknold. On one side of a CD envelope, he wrote a piece of prose about his very first memories and how exactly he remembers them. In it, he suggests that the photographs from his well-documented childhood have influenced how he remembers these snapshots of his early life and have probably warped his memory. He says that you can’t rely on photographs, but that he has always been able to rely on the memories and feelings that a piece of music evokes in him. It’s something I’ve always thought, but never been able to articulate.

After the religious experience of just reading the contents of a CD of one of my favorite bands, I’ve rethought my formerly snobby attitude toward buying CDs and instead downloading them through file sharing programs (a new media technology that Pecknold apparently supports). Having a library of books is something that’s always been important to me; I don’t keep every book I read or buy, but I like to have copies of my favorites so I can always access them. Having a library of CDs is the same way, but in this medium it’s more out of respect for a fan’s relationship to and appreciation of the music and the people who made it.

Since watching the Winter Olympics and guffawing at how young all these world-class athletes are, I’ve subconsciously been on a quest to make myself feel better about the fact that I’m 22 years old and essentially have nothing to show for it (except this blog… hey!). But this helps. Pecknold and Skjelset came from the same tepid suburban environment that I came from, and grew up just neighborhoods away. My middle class guilt and related disdain for minivans has always made me feel like talented and inspirational people don’t come from the suburbs; there’s simply nothing there that motivates greatness or diversity (I grew up in many suburbs across the country, but I still don’t think that improves my chances of greatness).

To me though, it’s inspirational that two white kids of Norwegian heritage who went to high school in Kirkland, Washington and who I could have easily met in passing at some point have this kind of raw but sophisticated talent and are doing something about it. Maybe if I lurk around Kirkland enough during spring break, I’ll even run into them.