0.19.1 - Ohhh, We're Halfway There...
I thought long and hard about listening to Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet (an album I owned on cassette tape and listened to on my walkman when I was a young teen) for album number 500, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. If I were a bigger Bon Jovi fan, if it was a less significant milestone I might have done it for the bit.
Here we are, five hundred unique studio albums consumed in 132 days of listening. It's all downhill from here, an easy coast across the finish line for 1000 just around the corner. Strangely, while I say I don't plan these things ahead of time really, I know exactly what album 1000 is going to be already, I have that in my head as something to aim for. Album 500, however, snuck up on me, and suddenly I was in the middle of planning a tranche of albums I was going to listen to this week and realised all of a sudden that one of them was going to end up being my half-way point. So I pushed back my mini-listening project for this week, ran through some albums to get to 499, and then had a gentle panic about what I was going to listen to here.
The answer was, in hindsight, obvious.
I've been steering away from listening to The Beatles for this project in the main because I would have no idea what to say when I did listen to them. What could I possibly contribute to the millions of lines of text, hours of documentary footage, gigabytes of podcast dialogue devoted to what is probably the most completely scrutinised band of all time? In short, not much, apart from to talk about my own personal context with them. They are completely, comprehensively, undeniably the most important contributors to my own music tastes from being as young as I can remember.
There was once in my parents possession, and may still be, an audio cassette recording of me. I think I'm perhaps three or four years old. In this recording, in an uncertain, piping voice I am singing the chorus to Carry That Weight from Abbey Road. There's a very real chance this is the first album I comprehended listening to all the way through. My parents would tell stories to people about coming into my bedroom at night because I would be lying in my crib singing fragments of songs from this album, and I would sit motionless for 49 minutes at a time if they put headphones on me and deposited me in front of the record player with this on the turntable. I don't know how to talk about this album in terms of feeling or emotion, I can't break it down track by track because I can't comprehend it as anything other than a fundamental part of myself. Abbey Road is as much a part of me as my hands, my education, my upbringing. It's the lock and key to whatever part of my being relates to music; I can't imagine a world in which is does not exist.
We were always a Beatles household. They existed as the pinnacle of musical aspiration. I remember my father playing Blackbird on his acoustic guitar, and years later, my sister doing the same; I remember, long before the idea of cosplay existed in the public consciousness, my parents taking a group of their friends along with my sister and I and our friends, to see The Bootleg Beatles in full Yellow Submarine cosplay. I went as a Blue Meanie, and my friend Jamie and I spent hours beforehand covering ourselves in blue body paint. There's a photo of that somewhere, one of the few I wish I still had lying around, and I try not to get nostalgic about the good old days. We went as a family to see Paul McCartney play at Sheffield Arena some time in the mid 90's, because my parents felt it was important that we had at least seen one Beatle play live. In an environment where our relationship with music in many ways defined who we were as a family and how we related to each other (or didn't), the Beatles were our constant, and while I am sure there are reams of discussion about where the various Beatles albums rank in relation to one another, Abbey Road will to me always be the most important Beatles album of all time. It had to be here.
Shall we review what we have learned, fifty percent of the way through this ridiculous venture? I've been thinking about that too this afternoon, and I don't want to get all analytical or in the weeds about it, so I'll give you some fun stats, and then tell you the main thing I've learned, five hundred albums into this endeavour.
500 Albums has represented 17 days, 7 hours and 31 minutes of continuous musical exposure; in that time, I've listened to 6,264 songs by 348 different artists (of which 70 I have seen perform live at some point in my life). I've written 128,892 words up to and including this one across 54 blog posts in 20 weeks worth of doing this, and all 100% without the 'assistance' of any resource wasting internet boondoggles (I live with constant low grade anxiety that people out there might think I've used some kind of AI to help write this, so let me be clear - fuck AI, this is all 100% me, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes and all)
Here's the takeaway:-
It's been easy. I started off intimidated by the prospect of listening to a thousand albums - I couldn't envisage what that would look like, where I would draw my inspiration, how I would fit it in. Turns out, fitting it in was the easiest part; the amount of time I was wasting watching pointless comfort youtube second screen drivel just to have something aimless chattering away in the background was inordinate, and far better repurposed to accommodating my new listening habits; and there is so much music out there, good music, interesting, unexpected music that the idea of not being able to reach a thousand now seems laughable. Stuck in my algorithmic rut, reverting to listening to the same 5 or 10 albums every year because challenging myself to do something different took effort had me trapped. Instead of spending five minutes to think about something I've not gone back to, or exploring the albums of a band I listened to briefly before moving on, I looked at the 15 albums in my Most Recently Played on Spotify and started one of those again. I've been overjoyed at the outcome this unruly brainwave has had on my media consumption this year, and I hope if anyone is reading this, it's helped them re-examine their relationship with the music in their life for the better as well.
The downhill slope starts here.
