They’re Coming to Take Me Away: Rediscovering My Music with Navidrome

From a Fisher-Price record player and two tins of 45s to building my own personal Spotify on a home server.

When I was a little kid, my godmother gave me a Fisher-Price record player. It was one of those little plastic jobs designed to survive whatever abuse a child could throw at it. I had a handful of children’s records, little 45s with songs presumably selected to entertain and educate me.

I wasn’t particularly interested in those.

What interested me were two enormous cookie tins filled with my mom’s old 45s.

My mom had grown up in the 1950s and 60s, and those tins were packed with the music she’d collected as a girl. The Beatles. Elvis Presley. The Monkees. The Box Tops. Tommy James and the Shondells. Hundreds of records, many of them already well-worn by the time I got my hands on them.

I played the hell out of those things.

I knew the words to “Yellow Submarine,” “The Letter,” and “Crimson and Clover.” I played them over and over, lifting the needle and starting again. I didn’t know much about the artists or the history of rock and roll. I just knew I loved the music.

And then there was one of my absolute favorites: “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” by Napoleon XIV.

If you’ve never heard it, it’s a wonderfully deranged novelty song about a guy losing his mind. Perfectly appropriate listening material for a small child, obviously.

But the really fascinating part was the B-side. Instead of another song, it was the same recording played backward. The result was this bizarre, unsettling collection of sounds that seemed like something from another dimension.

I was fascinated by it. I probably listened to that backward recording as much as the actual song.

Looking back, I suppose that was an early indication that I was going to grow up to be a little weird.

Eight D Batteries and a Dream

We had other ways to listen to music around the house. There was a stereo with a turntable for full-size albums and an 8-track player, a format that now seems like something an archaeologist might discover buried beneath a shopping mall.

But then the 1980s arrived, bringing with them one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements: the giant portable stereo.

One of my older brothers got a massive jam box. Dual cassette decks, big speakers, buttons everywhere. It was loud as hell, and it was glorious.

It usually lived in our living room, but technically you could take it anywhere. All you needed was something like eight or ten D batteries and the financial resources to replace them after approximately fifteen minutes.

Eventually I got my own boom box, and with it came the art of the mixtape.

Kids today will never understand the patience involved in making a good mixtape. You had to plan your songs, get the timing right, and sometimes sit beside the radio waiting for the DJ to shut the hell up so you could record the song you wanted.

And when you made a really good one? That tape was yours. You’d assembled something that didn’t exist anywhere else.

I loved it.

Music was also a live experience pretty early in my life. Just down the road in Nashville, Indiana, we had the Little Nashville Opry, where I saw dozens of performers over the years.

The Oak Ridge Boys were one of my favorites. I must have seen them four or five times. I knew their songs, loved their harmonies, and thought they put on one hell of a show.

My tastes were already all over the place.

They were about to get a whole lot stranger.

The Beastie Boys Changed Everything

I have a confession to make.

For much of my childhood, I thought 1980s popular music kind of sucked.

Not all of it, obviously. There was great music being made in the ’80s. The problem was that I wasn’t hearing much of it.

What I was hearing was whatever Top 40 radio station played on the school bus every day.

Bon Jovi. Def Leppard. Madonna. Robert Palmer.

Might as well face it, you’re addicted to loooooove.

Jesus Christ.

I wouldn’t discover until years later that bands like the Ramones had been out there making music I would have absolutely loved. But the radio wasn’t playing that stuff on our school bus.

And then one day, my buddy Kurt walked out to recess carrying the biggest jam box I’d ever seen.

It was blasting the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill.

I don’t remember exactly which song was playing. I just remember thinking it was probably the coolest thing I’d ever seen or heard.

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?

Around the same time, Run-D.M.C. entered my universe, and that was it. I was hooked.

Rap music was exciting in a way that the radio music I’d been subjected to simply wasn’t. It was loud, funny, aggressive, clever, and completely different from anything I’d heard before.

For several years, from around fourth or fifth grade through eighth grade, I was a full-blown rap convert.

Then my tastes started shifting again.

Discovering That the ’70s Were Better

By eighth grade, I’d started getting back into classic rock. I was discovering music from the 1970s and rediscovering the older sounds stored in those cookie tins, and much of it seemed vastly superior to the hair-metal nonsense I’d grown to despise.

The 1990s helped, too. Grunge arrived, alternative rock became mainstream, and metal started sounding a lot less like guys who spent three hours getting their hair ready.

I listened to music constantly.

Classic rock was probably my foundation. I went through a substantial Grateful Dead phase. I had a big country music kick, too. Eventually I developed an appreciation for just about everything.

Well, maybe not jazz. Sorry, jazz, but I did make an entire documentary about you if that helps.

And Reverend Horton Heat? Holy shit. That was my jam.

By college, I was still listening to all kinds of music, although I’m not sure I was doing much to expand my horizons. I do remember The Offspring getting played at a party or two.

Guilty as charged.

But another revolution was coming, and this one would completely change how I discovered music.

Napster, LimeWire, and the Golden Age of Discovery

When Napster arrived, followed by LimeWire and the rest of the early file-sharing universe, suddenly the walls came down.

For the first time, I could go looking for almost anything.

No waiting for a radio station to play it. No gambling fifteen bucks on a CD because I’d heard one song. No hoping that the record store in the mall happened to have something interesting.

Music discovery became an adventure.

Around that time, I joined The Gazette, an alternative weekly newspaper in Oklahoma City.

The paper had its own music critic, who was one of the coolest guys I’d ever met. He knew what was good, what was coming, and what was worth paying attention to. He introduced me to artists I’d never heard of and helped me develop a much broader appreciation for music.

And because record labels were constantly sending him promotional CDs, he occasionally passed a few along to me.

Free music! Good music! Music I’d probably never have discovered on my own!

For me, that was a golden age.

I had CD holders strapped to both sun visors in my car. There was music everywhere. I was always listening to something.

And it was my music.

Rarely the radio.

I’d learned my lesson on the school bus.

I also went to an absurd number of live shows during my years in Oklahoma City. Big shows, little shows, bands I’d loved for years, and bands I’d only recently discovered.

I even have what might be the most hilarious and profane White Stripes story in human history.

Unfortunately, this is a respectable website, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Actually, who am I kidding? This is my website. Maybe someday.

When the Music Stopped

For years, music was a constant companion, particularly in the car.

It was how I passed the time, how I made long drives bearable, how I stayed entertained and focused. I always had something playing.

Eventually I had an iPod, which felt like another technological miracle. All that music, right there in my pocket. No CD wallets, no swapping discs, no scratched cases sliding around the passenger seat.

Then my iPod died.

That was a dark day.

Fortunately, I’d kept most of my original CDs, so a lot of the collection could be recovered. But I’d also accumulated a substantial digital library on a hard drive, including music I’d purchased online and didn’t have physical copies of.

Then that hard drive died, too.

Another dark day.

And somewhere along the way, almost without realizing it, I stopped listening to music as much.

Not entirely. I still enjoyed it. I still had favorite albums and artists. But it was no longer the constant presence it had been for most of my life.

The pandemic probably accelerated that change. Around that same time, Mom died, and the songs we loved to listen to together now triggered emotions.

My job went completely remote, and suddenly I wasn’t commuting anymore.

You’d think that working from home would have given me more opportunities to listen to music. I could play anything I wanted, whenever I wanted.

But I didn’t.

I’ve realized that home serves a different purpose for me. It’s where I relax, think, work on projects, or simply enjoy a little peace and quiet. I don’t necessarily want music playing all the time.

The car was different. Music made the drive better. It kept me company.

For a while, satellite radio helped fill that void. I loved having so many channels and genres available. But eventually I couldn’t justify paying for it anymore, so I let the subscription expire.

And there I was.

A guy who’d spent most of his life collecting music, with thousands of songs scattered across CDs and hard drives, who somehow wasn’t listening to much of it anymore.

The music hadn’t gone anywhere.

I’d just lost the convenience of having it with me.

Enter AndrewServer3000

Recently, I decided to build myself a home server.

I bought a Minisforum MS-01 mini PC, installed Proxmox, spun up an Ubuntu virtual machine, and started filling it with Docker containers.

This little box has rapidly become the center of a growing collection of self-hosted projects.

Jellyfin turned it into my own personal Netflix, streaming my movie collection and home videos to the television, computers, and phones around the house.

Vaultwarden gave me a self-hosted password manager. AFFiNE became my notes and documentation workspace. Other projects are underway, with plenty more planned.

And then I started thinking about music.

I already had a bunch of music files. I had a server that was running around the clock. I had a network drive that made it easy to copy files onto the machine.

Why not build my own personal Spotify?

That’s where Navidrome came in.

My Own Personal Spotify

A few commands later, I opened a browser and there it was.

My music.

Artists, albums, tracks, album covers. All organized and ready to play.

The server was doing the same basic thing Jellyfin does for movies, only for music.

And the really cool part is how little work the server has to do. Navidrome is lightweight, and audio streaming requires a tiny fraction of the bandwidth that high-resolution video does.

Oh, and hell yes I’m going to make sure it’s backed up. No more dark days allowed.

The Technical Bits

For anyone interested in reproducing this setup, here’s the basic arrangement:

• Hardware: Minisforum MS-01 mini PC
• Hypervisor: Proxmox VE
• Virtual machine: Ubuntu Server
• Application platform: Docker Compose
• Music server: Navidrome
• File access: Samba network share
• Remote access: Tailscale
• Mobile playback: Symfonium on Android

Navidrome listens on port 4533. Its Docker container has access to the music directory through a read-only volume mount, so the application can index and play my music without modifying the original files.

On my Windows computer, the music folder is accessible through a mapped network drive. Adding an album is as simple as dragging it into a folder and letting Navidrome scan it.

For remote access, I use Tailscale, which creates an encrypted private network between my devices. That means I can access Navidrome from my phone even when I’m away from home, without exposing the music server directly to the public Internet.

On Android, Symfonium provides a polished music-player interface, connecting to Navidrome through the Subsonic-compatible API.

It can stream music and supports offline caching, which is particularly useful when traveling.

The result is a surprisingly complete personal music-streaming system, running on a tiny computer in my house.

No monthly music subscription. No advertising. No recommendation algorithm trying to convince me I should listen to something else.

Just my collection.

Of course, there’s a trade-off. I have to maintain the server, organize the files, and keep backups. And unlike Spotify, Navidrome isn’t going to magically provide every album ever recorded.

But I rather like having that control.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

After getting Navidrome running, I opened it in my browser and looked through the albums it had indexed.

The first thing I played was Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

If you’re familiar with that album, you know it’s a strange, beautiful, occasionally chaotic collection of songs. It’s one of my favorites.

And hearing it play through this little server I’d built was unexpectedly satisfying.

Not because Navidrome somehow made the music sound better.

It didn’t.

But there was something special about hearing an old favorite through a system I’d assembled myself, knowing that I could now pull out my phone and listen to it wherever I happened to be.

I tested the remote connection. It worked.

Just like that, my music was mobile again.

I could listen in the car. On a walk. On a trip. Anywhere I had an Internet connection, or offline if I’d downloaded the tracks ahead of time.

Something I’d taken for granted for years, then gradually lost, was back.

And it wasn’t because I’d signed up for another subscription.

It was because I’d built something.

Full Circle

I’ve been thinking about those two cookie tins.

My mom probably never imagined that the records she collected as a girl in the ’50s and ’60s would eventually become such an important part of my childhood.

She certainly couldn’t have imagined that her son would someday have a little computer in his house capable of streaming thousands of songs to a telephone.

Hell, neither could I.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the technology isn’t really the important part.

The Fisher-Price record player, the 8-track stereo, the giant jam box, the mixtapes, the CD wallets, the iPod, the hard drives, and now Navidrome were all doing essentially the same thing.

They made music accessible.

And when music was accessible, I listened to it.

A lot.

At some point, I’d lost that easy connection. The music was still there, but it had become something I had to make an effort to enjoy.

Now it’s back in my pocket.

Will I use it as much as I did when I was a kid, wearing out my mom’s old 45s?

Probably not.

Life is different now. My habits have changed. Sometimes I still prefer the quiet.

But I think I’ll use it.

And I’m looking forward to discovering music again, digging through old favorites, and perhaps introducing Henry to some of the songs that meant so much to me.

Maybe someday I’ll even play him “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”

And then flip it over.

Because some things are just too wonderfully weird not to pass along.