Musical pledge

I buy too much music and then don't listen to it. As a result I have many albums I have played only once, and once isn't enough to get a feel for an album. David Hepworth puts it much better than me:

Even to the trained ear they [rock records] all sound the same the first four or five times through. ... The things that mark out the tiny handful of great records from the thousands of fair to middling ones only emerge over time and they do so when you’re not concentrating. Great records creep up on you like friendship. The things that make them great records are often not obvious on first acquaintance.

So now I have created a rule for myself that I must write something about each album I buy. This forces me to listen to it enough times to be able to say something meaningful. Sometimes this takes a few weeks because I cannot just listen to new music all the time without a leavening of something I know and like.

Even then, it's not necessarily enough time. I reviewed Richard Ashcroft's Alone With Everybody for a friend's webzine back in 2000 (although he never used it, so I recycled it as a last.fm journal) and was pretty scathing about it. But you know what? It grew on me over a period of years.

Luckily, I have yet to implement a corollary rule that prevents me from buying more albums until I've played and reviewed all the ones I already have. So the list keeps growing ....

Anyway, here's a handy, cut-out-n-keep, scratch-n-sniff index to my music pieces. Most are on this blog, but some were done as last.fm journals.