Record Reconstructor

Here it is, my white whale.  I changed the numbering scheme because it felt like putting "Day 1048: Duran Duran" seemed disingenous and made me look like the obvious flake that I am.  Also, I'm definitely not commiting myself to doing one of these a day like I did before, since I think the pressure is part of what burned me out - instead, when the mood strikes me, I'll fire up and album from the Pile and see if it makes me want to write something about it. This one, however, remains inscrutable.  As I listen to "The Reflex", I'm not transported back to a specific time, place or person.  I try and think back and ask myself "Why do I own this album?  How has it remained in my collection when so many better albums have been lost in a dozen house moves, loans to friends, or left in car glove boxes absent-mindedly?".  I have no memory of my motivations for its purchase.  Like a traumatic event, it is as if the recollection has been repressed of the ...

Duran Duran gave me writer's block for three years.   They're what's next in the pile, and with momentum on my side and 68 previously published anecdote/story/album review hybrids behind me I slammed headfirst into Simon Le Bon and came to a screeching halt.  There's also a degree to which my pause coincided with Catherine's 40th Birthday celebrations, which I spent a lot of time organising, then Christmas, then a change in my job which meant my free time got pretty drastically curtailed and by the time I realised I hadn't written anything for weeks, then months, it got harder and harder to bring myself back to the keyboard and figure out what pithy bon mots I could summon up to describe my feelings for "Is There Something I Should Know?". Given current circumstances, that's what I like to refer to as the Good Old Days.  Now, 4 months into a global pandemic that is as frustrating to sit in isolation through as it is maddening to see those...

As we embark on a new column of albums from The Pile, we reach one I've been looking forward to writing about for a while - in fact, it was nearly the very first album I wrote about for the site.  You see there's very little ordering to the layout of the Pile, but when I was looking at which albums were at the top, and saw this one sat in the first position of my actual CD racks (rather than the loose pile of CDs next to it), I nearly re-arranged where the columns of loose CDs were just so I could write about it first.  In the end I thought that went against the spirit of the original tweet which prompted this whole endeavour, but now I've slogged through 67 albums already, my reward is I get to talk about this most unlikely of CDs. I'm delighted to tell you you can listen to me here Generally, albums in the Pile tend to fall into one of two categories;  either they have some weird and personal connection to me, or they are interesting from a musical point o...

That's the first 20% done. It was more or less 120 days ago that the idea to write this blog was suggested to me on twitter, and here I am, 4 months later, still plugging away at it.  While I'm conscious there have been significant gaps in which stuff hasn't been posted, I have also in that time accomplished a huge amount personally while still keeping the home fires burning here on my little slice of the internet enough for it to still feel like it's something that matters to me. I've had a lot of very nice feedback about the whole endeavour - as I said way back on Day 0, this started life as a kind of Midlife Crisis Prevention Exercise, a way to write about and share stuff about my experience in the last 40 years with some kind of focus.  If you've enjoyed it, taken anything positive away from it, or just feel like you know me a little better now, that's a fantastic bonus. Because people are occasionally interested in these things, here are the...

I'm not really a great believer in concepts like serendipity or kharma.  As someone who tries to fashion themselves as much as a realist as I can without descending into that Peter Hitchins/Richard Dawkins bubble of self-superior madness which seems unavoidably linked with that mindset, I'm a fan of coincidence over 'fate', and that what some people see as patterns in the chaos of the universe, I'm generally alive to the idea that people can find patterns in just about anything if they look hard enough and they really want to. All that being said, either subconsciously or because there really is an order to the universe and it's currently messing with me, today's album continues to follow a theme of depression, and people's reactions to it, which has been poking its head up in various aspects of my life over the last week. Listen to me here I wish I was a better singer.  I'm not completely atonal, and can carry a tune OK as long as its wi...

I don't blame any of you for thinking I had forgotten about this.  The truth is both more profound and prosaic than me losing interest - sometimes, life gets in the way, and over the last 3 weeks I've been to America and back, participated in two World Championships, been horrifically ill, and orchestrated a 40th Birthday Party for my significant other which was as successful as it was mentally and fiscally draining.  And in all the time these other tasks have been taking over my life, I've looked back at The Pile knowing that there are only 2 albums left in the first stack for me to write about. So now, the dust has settled, a degree of normality has returned to my weekly schedule, and I find myself with time again to sit back at my PC, listen to a whole album, and write about it some more. Today's album is a combination of misguided, puzzling, and inevitable, a kind of melange of bad decision making which to this day comes back to haunt me, but rarely in musical ...

If ever I needed an incentive to get through writing about Muse yesterday, it was the knowledge that next in the pile was this album, which is so loaded with personal associations, gig stories and general musical interest that this blog entry might end up being three thousand words long before I decide to rein myself in.  It's the seminal album by a band who's reputation is either a mould-breaking, hyper-talented band who defy classical genre classification, or a group of pretentious metal wannabes who's very name (along with Radiohead) was internet shorthand for identifying obnoxious music snobs in the mid 2000s.  It's Tool time. Listen to a dubiously legal version of me here People like to think they are clever, especially adolescent men, and I was no exception.  Certainly a large proportion of people, me included, love the way that revelatory moment feels when it lands on you out of the blue, when you realise that the thing you were already enjoying has a h...