An Album per Day Keeps the Homework Away!!

So part of the reason why I just created this blog is to catalog something of a resolution I made to listen to a different randomly-chosen album every day.

I hit upon this idea when I realized that my "completed albums" folder had hit the 1000 album mark. You see, I'm cursed with the fact that while I have absolutely zero organizational impulses when it comes to the areas of my life that could use them (I have completed my taxes in June and August the past two years...), I'm an absolute anal weirdo when it comes to my music collection, all of which has migrated over to digital format over the course of time. I've gone through a number of different organizing mechanisms. First by genre; where my classic rock lived here, and my trance there...etc. Then I lost the energy for that, and just had different areas of my computer that were haphazardly organized by when I acquired the files...this sorta continued the genre theme, since I would tend to acquire music of a particular sort at any given time (the stuff I got in 2001 was mostly prog house, in 2002 mostly deep house, 2003 mostly ambient and acid jazz...).

But obviously that wasn't a tidy solution, and somewhere along the way I started disliking just having a random assortment of files in random places. I wanted only full albums, and I wanted them to be formatted in a particular way, with album art...I became a completionist. And increasing my collection became more important than listening to a lot of it. A good amount of my music I have only listened to partially...and I'm convinced that even in this era of digital distribution that there is virtue to the album format (or at least the potential for bands to make important aesthetic movements with that format).

So, I'm going to *try* to, once per day, set my album list on winamp to shuffle and see what comes up. My list of rules (malleable at my discretion) is that I'll listen to whatever comes up no matter what, but no EPs, no live bootlegs, no demo cds, no random DJ mixes....basically, nothing that hasn't been actually published as a full album. And no repeats, of course. I have doubts as to how interesting most of my little write-ups will be, but I'm doing this mainly to force myself to closely listen to things I otherwise wouldn't (I'm presently stuck on Henrik Schwartz's DJ Kicks album, the New Pornographer's first album, and the Doobie Brothers, strangely enough). The first album in the next post.