Sunday, May 29, 2011

The iPod Adventure

So for this post, I thought I would talk about my iPod adventure. It started at work one day when I realized I could not think of anything to listen to. I had a full 80GB iPod classic at the time and I was missing about 30GB of my library. I was waiting for a friend who worked at the Apple store to use his friends and family discount to get me a 160GB classic. So I figured, "Damn, if I have this much music, I should really try to make sure I've heard every track at least once."

Now time for a little background, or more so an explanation of why I have so much music. My favorite band is Queen. When I listened to their Greatest Hits album at the age of 11, I loved every song. When I got Classic Queen (The US Equivalent of Greatest Hits II) very soon after, it was the same story. They would end up becoming  favorite band. The whole story is probably for another post, but essentially for the next few years I bought all their studio albums and became a fan of the entire catalog. This initial experience influenced and somewhat formulated my music listening habits forever. Only now am I realizing that just because I like a few songs or even one entire album from a band,  it does not mean I need to listen to their entire discography. This of course became even easier to do with the advent of the Internet, where an entire band's discography is only a few clicks away.

So I have gathered a lot of music, a lot of it I have ripped form my personal collection, a lot of it I grabbed out of curiosity off the Internet. Once it gets categorized and organized into my music folders, It sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of other more important new music coming in. So the goal of the iPod adventure was to listen to all of this music just to make sure I didn't "miss" anything. Here's the other thing about my somewhat massive music collection, it takes a lot, I mean a lot for me to to delete anything. Simply because tastes change. More than once have I found something I didn't care for years ago only to rediscover it after a song comes up on shuffle.

So I am almost at the one year anniversary and I've listened to probably around 8000 songs and powered through to the letter M. I don't exclusively listen to music just to complete the adventure. If I know what I want to listen to I listen to it, but when I can't think of what to listen to I just pull up the next artist down the list and go for it. So that's the story on going adventure that I'm sure will come up more than once. 

Sunday, November 21, 2010

What does it all mean?

This is my music blog. I love music, immensely. I love the overwhelming feeling when a song can literally take your breath away when you hear it the first time. I love what it can do to your state of mind, the way it can change your mood or reinforce it, act as a backdrop, or a vehicle to take you somewhere else.

What made me want to start this blog, was the fact that I realized I gradually stopped felling the same way about music that I remembered feeling when I was a teenager. I remembered when everything that touched my ears was golden and I was discovering new artists (or new to me at least) on a weekly basis.

Lately I noticed there were very few bands I was listening to that were either the same, or extensions of the bands I liked years ago. This year I turned 25, which seems strange to me since my own personal musical renaissance started around the time I turned 15. I want to feel that way again, and this blog is dedicated to that. The title is a little misleading, because I will admit that I'm jaded about my music experiences and tastes, but hopefully this blog will highlight the good more than the bad.Oh, and the title of this blog lifted form a Pinhead Circus song, I always thought the phrase was kind of clever and it stuck with me.