If you’ve been around here long enough, reading that post title may immediately lead you to think that maybe I’ve started working on the increasingly-obsolete CD Archive. Or at the very least maybe I’ve made a WordPress-style page for it. No. No I have not.
It’s probably a slightly more interesting story in reality. Probably.
I have a long work day. It consists of a 40-minute bus ride to work, eight-and-a-half hours in the office, and then another 40-minute (if traffic is light) bus ride back home. So I listen to a lot of music via my iPhone, not unlike many other downtown-based drones. I’ve noticed that over the last few months I’ve been falling back on one or two albums to listen to for so long, until I pop a new one on there and it replaces one of the old ones.
Not a huge deal in itself, but I feel bad for neglecting the other 95% of the music on there, so I decided to do something radical. No, I did not hit the shuffle button, that would offend my OCDishness far too much. Instead, I decided that for the past week, I would listen to one album for each letter in the alphabet, in alphabetical order. It’s not really the best way to spice up my listening tendencies, but it’s something.
I might also mention that the mix of music on my phone is a little past eccentric. I’ve got everything from classic rock to nerdcore rap to classical. From Ke$ha to Hawksley Workman to Ghost Hounds. I have both the Xenoblade Chronicles soundtrack and Dustin Kensrue’s Please Come Home on there. It’s varied, and while it’s not all in the best of taste, it’s all squarely in my taste. So go suck and egg if you don’t like it.
Because I will take any reason to make up a list, the results of my project and some musings are after the jump.
- Are You Dead Yet? – Children of Bodom
- The Black Swan – Story of the Year
- Chase This Light – Jimmy Eat World
- Deceiver – The Word Alive
- The Egg Hunt – Making April
- From Under the Cork Tree – Fall Out Boy
- …Go Down Swinging! – The Acro-Brats
- Hello Fascination – Breathe Carolina
- Invented – Jimmy Eat World
- Jonathan Coulton’s Greatest Hit (Plus 13 Other Songs) – Jonathan Coulton
- Kilroy Was Here – Styx
- Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da – Rammstein
- Milk – Hawksley Workman
- N/A
- Orchids & Ammunition – Drist
- Please Come Home – Dustin Kensrue
- Quadrophenia – The Who
- Real to Reel – Tesla
- Stories of a Stranger – OAR
- Tragic Kingdom – No Doubt
- N/A
- Venus Doom – HIM
- What Are You So Scared Of? – Tonight Alive
- Xenoblade Original Soundtrack – ACE+/YokoShimomura/Manami Kiyota
- N/A
- N/A
- 13’s Reborn – Girugamesh
Note that WordPress is an asshat and those numbers are supposed to be letters. Stupid WordPress.
Obviously there wasn’t any planning here. Four letters went unrepresented and at least three others only had a single album to them. But really, how many albums do you have on your iPod that start with X? Planning ahead would probably have defeated the whole purpose anyway. Also I decided to do this while I was at work, where iTunes and my greater music library aren’t available.
I hate to say it, but the operation wasn’t entirely successful. Hello Fascination and What Are You So Scared Of? are precisely the two albums that I was looking to put aside for a while. Chase This Light is one of my two “comfort food” albums that I listen to anytime I don’t know what to listen to. Alas, old habits die hard? I probably should have used random.org to make my selections for letters with more than one choice.
I’m going to have to change up the content of my phone and try this again. Only next time, I’ll add more rules and use random.org to sort things out. As it is there weren’t a lot of wacky choices on here. Milk is probably the one that sticks out the most. Oh well. Not like there was any point to this besides “force yourself to listen to other music.”