For as long as I have been into music, I have been an avid reader and rereader of music guides. I spent many hours pawing over various NME guides as a teenager. Since then there have been the Mojo guide, essential albums / songs / artists / labels, genre guides, etc..
Nearly one thousand colour pages proclaiming the "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" is too good to resist. (As if resistance was ever seriously contemplated.)
First published in 2005, the edition I received (from a prescient Santa) was published in 2009 and includes ten albums from 2008. (I wonder which older albums were dropped to make way for these ten?)
Another Christmas present was a new turntable - something I've been without for...15 years? 20 years?
As much as I love iTunes, iPhones, Genius, I have recently been finding music fatiguing. Genius and "1001 Songs" by Toby Creswell have enabled me to excavate parts of my music collection that haven't been heard for millenia. But it is omnipresent (my iPhone and its portable music subcollection is never far away). And it is work. A track comes up on a Genius playlist that I haven't listened to for ages - there is no album artwork - and it is from a compilation album and the date is wrong. So now I am working through all the songs I have in iTunes from that artist...finding artwork, assigning songs to correct original albums, correcting dates and so on.
I am really looking forward to lying on my bed with album cover in hand and intentionally listening to a whole album - or at least side a of an LP. No skipping, no genius lists, no curating.
A turntable + "1001 Albums..." = blog entries
There will be much slicing and dicing of the 1001 albums - as well as individual album reviews.
It promises to be a fun time. If you are reading this, I'd love to hear from you. The life of a blogger can be lonely.
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