I feel like I’m in a rut. A musical rut. I can’t seem to find a comfortable place where music makes me happy and I can listen for hours on end in happiness.

There was once a time when I could listen to the same album over and over and over and over until it was worn out and I could play each part on its respective instrument without bothering to know how to play said instrument.

In fifth through seventh grade it was Van Halen. I was a total addict. I wore the shirts and hats and had Eddie Van Halen plastered all over my walls. I wanted to dress like him, act like him and marry Valerie Bertonelli like him. I didn’t, however have a desire to have a cocaine and alcohol problem or be an arrogant ass. So I grew out of it (though my inexplicable love for their music lasted until my freshman year of college).

In high school it was Led Zeppelin. Constant listens to Physical Graffiti somehow gave me a new level of consciousness. I was cool and hip and groovy, even though I never said groovy. I could quote the dreamy lyrics of Robert Plant the way some people can quote the bible.

High school also meant Jimi Hendrix and any other guitar god known to man. Jeff Beck, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and blues legends like Buddy Guy and BB King. I was learning how to expand my horizons but I was still limited to the familiar.

In college I got into Springsteen and Dylan. I was moving toward the intellectual. Then I discovered Elvis Costello. Elvis is the one musical act that most people identify me with. I don’t think I look like an Elvis Costello fan, but I must have the smell or something.

I continued my love for blues and cultivated my love for off-the-beat-path music.

Then my brother introduced me to Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and I became enamored with the amazing sounds of Brian Wilson’s genius and insanity (Sweet Insanity, to be specific).

Around the same time a friend from work started introducing me to music that was so far off the beaten track that you had to go to specialized stores to find it. Yet another friend was showing me contemporary classical music. And yet another friend was trying to get me into French pop.

And it happened. My musical identity fractured and exploded. I had no identifiable music, per se (though Power Pop seems to be what most people peg me for). Rather I am a musical schizophrenic. My hard drive is filled with various music that I play all day long as I work. An example of any give hour:

Ben Folds, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Loud Family, Coldplay, Radiohead, Elvis Costello, Aimee Mann, Cherry Twister, Moby, Rocking Teenage Combo, Beach Boys, The Faces, Velvet Underground, Stew, Wondermints, Splitsville, Belle and Sebastian, Call and Response, Linus of Hollywood, Charles Mingus, Louis Prima, Air, Arling & Cameron, Sterolab, High Llamas, Bruce Springsteen, The Flaming Lips, Michael Nyman, Damon Albaron, Apples in Stereo, Cornelius, Ramones . . .

It goes on. I like myself now, musically. I enjoy knowing all these bands as a group rather than being stuck in a genre. I like the fact that I knew who Ryan Adams, Ben Kweller and Norah Jones were long before the masses picked up on their talent. I like that I’m told that I listen to the weirdest music only to then be told that my CD compilations are works of genius. I like handing someone a CD I made and watching their face as The Kinks deftly fade into The Magnetic Fields before you’re assaulted with The Flashing Lights.

But lately . . . I feel too fragmented. Too far spread across the musical map. Too undefined. Do they have prescription drugs for this?

I’m looking forward to the new Negro Problem CD and the new Wondermints. But those are one and two weeks off from release. I’ll listen to them until they’re worn out, that’s for sure.

I realized that I’m addicted to discovery and I’m running out of avenues to trod. I went on a musical bacchanal for the last several years and I’ve just woken up with an aural hang over. I don’t know where I am or where to go.

Any ideas? Know any good music that cannot possibly live without? (Thanks to John for his latest recommendation, by the way.)