Record Reconstructor

Dashboard! By 1998 I had got pretty good at putting on my own eyeliner.  Like painting my nails, it had taken some practice and several catastrophic failures before I could even manage to approximate correct application, but I was fortunate to have young women I knew at the time who were delighted to correct my mistakes, or give me useful tips;  while I am certain the audience for this comment right now is zero, should these posts somehow make their way to a more widespread audience*, if you are a young man and you're struggling to figure out how to talk to or relate to the women in your peer group, have the self confidence OR complete lack of self-esteem so you don't care what people think about you (either works) to ask them to help you paint your nails.  It's vulnerable, lets them teach you something, and guarantees at least 5-10 minutes of one-on-one conversation.  I have never known it to fail. Despite all my practice, my eyeliner game still required me to be st...

Dashboard! Eventually serendipity is going to stop delivering to me these ideas for topics and I might have to think about what I am going to write in advance like some kind of animal, but as long as the universe is going to keep suggesting topics, I'm going to keep following it's direction, if only because I love the path of least resistance. On Monday this week, I listened to my 200th album since I started doing this, and I deliberately stopped at 199 just before the Superbowl because I wanted to give some thought to what I would listen to as the digits ticked over to 200.  I even drove nearly two hours to Manchester listening to podcasts instead of music because I wasn't ready to commit to a 200th album choice.  By Monday morning, I had decided.  I've been putting off listening to Taylor Swift albums because I don't want to exhaust them all so early into the year;  as a special occasion, I would allow myself to listen to her most recent album, because she name ch...

  Dashboard!  I get it, naming things is hard.  Names are important, they have power and weight and meaning.  You can stop people mid-flow talking about an idea or a film or a character or a song when you say "OK, but what's it called?", and the shutters go down behind their eyes/the creative process freezes in place like it was encased in ice.  And that's just one person.  Now imagine you need to find a name that two, or three, or five, or eight, (or thirty nine if you are The Polyphonic Spree) people all agree is good and appropriate and most of all, cool and memorable. Why then does the eponymous / self-titled album irritate me the way that it does?  Is it worse when it's the first album in a band's catalogue, or if it comes several releases into a discography?  Is there ever a good reason to release a self-titled album?  These are all questions I've spent the day thinking about while listening to a selection of self-titled albums, and whi...