Dashboard!
Yes, I remembered I was going to do this. In fact, it's been playing on my mind since the end of November as I've started to think clearly about what accomplishing this feat is going to take. As someone who's job involves thinking about numbers a great deal, I'm very aware of how seductive arbitrary numbers can sound.
"A thousand albums?," you think, "That can't be that hard? I must have listened to more than a thousand albums in my life already that I liked and could go back to? I'll just do that again, but faster."
Think about your favourite, longest running bands. I've spent more time on earth than I care to admit out loud now, so I have a few bands which I really love which have an extensive back catalogue of studio albums. If I could get ten bands with ten albums in their discography that I love, then that's a significant chunk of the work done for me, right?
Readers, I sat and wracked my brains and in the many, many, many years I've spent listening to music I could only summon up nine bands I like who have a ten-plus deep run of published albums at all. I know there are more, but if I can't even get to 10% of my total without exhausting the bands whose work I've listened to the most, the size of the task ahead looms terrifyingly into view.
I do have some strategies in mind, and I've got an initial run of albums to chew through as low hanging fruit in January while I try and come up with a sustainable way of surfacing the one thousand different albums I need to listen to over the course of this year, but I'm now very conscious of quite how much management will be required to make this work.
And when it comes to complex management of unwieldy data, well, I have a friend I can always call on.
Excel is my constant.
Well, actually Google Sheets in this case, just because I wanted it to be shareable and so I could link it to Blogger with some degree of compatibility.
So, if you are following along at home, I made you all a fun dashboard, which will tell you where I am in my listening quest and some data slice pie charts because I can't help myself. Whenever I update the blog, I'll also make sure the dashboard is up to date, and I'll keep it pinned at the top of each post so you can find it easily.
OK, on with the show. Today I lined up a four-album themathon, lets see how I got on:-
Basic? Obvious? Possibly, but I love a good theme to guide me and it being New Year's Day is only going to happen once on this project so I might as well knock all four of these out together.
I came to Transatlanticism is a very roundabout way; I had a long and abiding love for The Postal Service's one and only album (more on that when I get to it), but never really followed up on the more well known musical act it had taken it's lead singer from. I think I thought they were some kind of thrash metal band at first (not that I dislike a bit of well placed thrash metal); eventually, when streaming music services appeared to give us "try anything at no cost" access to music at the touch of a button, I of course ended up listening to Narrow Stairs a bunch, and not this, their most beloved and seminal album. 'The New Year' is a colossally good opening track, and I'm now deeply fond of the whole album, as we listened to it several times while driving around the remote parts of the Scottish Highlands this year on our wonderful, peaceful, remote holiday. This is the crow that launched a thousand Dashboard Confessionals, but we can't hold that against it..
Reputation made me the most uncomfortable to listen to, as I am loathe to put any more money into Scooter Braun's pockets, and it exists as one of the only two remaining Taylor Swift albums not currently rereleased in a (Taylor's Version). But timing being what it was, it ends with a track called "New Year's Day" and were she not off performing the largest and most successful live music event in history, she could have buckled down and got the re-release handled before I decided to do this six weeks ago. Very inconsiderate of her.
I'll talk more about my Taylor fandom some other time, but Reputation is my joint least-listened to album of hers for the above-mentioned Versioning issue, so it was very nice to go back to. When it first came out, I did think she had kind of lost her mind after the success of Red and 1989; my revisionist history take on it now is that people were just not ready for it (geddit), and there are several songs on here which are now in the pantheon of my all time favourite Swiftie tracks. I even really like the song with Ed Sheeran on it, which I've come to terms with despite it making me doubt myself significantly; I had a weird phase a couple of years ago of just listening to "Don't Blame Me" on repeat after it came up in a shuffle mix while on a plane to Japan and the high note at the climax of that song still makes my hair stand on end. Bring on RepTV this year, please Tay. We are clowning for it.
I can't say much about The Joshua Tree that hasn't been said by serious music critics in significantly longer than a paragraph or two. U2 were a band that kind of passed me by; my Dad didn't like them (for complicated, Troubles-related feelings he had being a part of the British military in the 1980's) so I never heard them through my parents, and as such I've been aware of their monolithic status in rock history without really indulging in it myself. My partner Catherine however is a huge fan of early U2, so I've now had nearly two decades of exposure to their back catalogue from inception through to All That You Can Leave Behind, and to no-ones surprise there are some good albums in that run, of which this is undoubtedly the best.
There are a lot of bands from the 70's who I worry exist only now in the general consciousness as a kind of accepted gestalt; a protean hulk from which Greatest Hits albums are birthed, whose presence is accepted as eternal, but if someone were to say "I enjoy the songs of ABBA", they'd find themselves unable to name a single studio album they had listened to. As such, it gave me great joy to go back and listen to Super Trouper, a regular visitor to my parent's turntable back in the day, and rediscover the lesser known but still familiar strains of 'Our Last Summer' and 'Me and I' mixed in with four smash hits this album counts amongst its ranks. I got to the end of this and made a note to myself to listen to more/other ABBA albums as part of this project.
Four down, nine-hundred and ninety-six to go.
Happy New Year.
