Record Reconstructor

This week:  Bon Iver, Paul McCartney, Death Cab, Ani DiFranco and a grab bag of other artists So, I'm not sleeping again.  Good for my productivity - if listening to albums at four in the morning and writing these works at 7am counts as productive - bad for my general focus and energy levels.  In this case, it's not exclusively the general state of the world which is summoning me from my comfortable bed in the early hours, though that's definitely still a factor.  In this case, I think either one or both of Catherine and I are fighting off some kind of low grade summer cold;  nothing major, but it's making Catherine snore like a rusty chainsaw at the moment, and there's really no solving for it.  So for the past few nights, I've been awakened by the miniature grinding wheel taking up residence next to me, which snaps me awake;  and once I am awake, both my body and mind betray me.  My ancient and infirm body tells me that since I am awake, I shoul...

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...

   Dashboard!  I knew that by committing doing these weekly wrap ups each week that I was going to have to scoop up a bunch of albums in one big megapost in order to try and stick to the brief.  I don't think I realised quite how many different records I was going to have to skim past with just a sentence or two - often critical darlings and personal favourites all getting the drive-by shooting treatment as they become just another statistic on the relentless journey to 1000, but here we are.   What I can do, before I dive into all the albums I listened to this week, is talk about about how I've ended up picking what I listened to.  Originally, my thought process was pretty route one - there must be a thousand albums I've listened to that I can name off the top of my head, let's just start grabbing stuff out of my mental list of music and throw it scattershot across the week.  Now, obviously, there are times when I've picked a particular artist to...