Back to Blogging...The Music Calls

I'm going to start this first blog in over two months with the following statement that I will gladly stand by any day:

I love the band Dr. Dog.

Right now I'm listening to their latest album, "Shame, Shame" and am in love with it! Their last album "Fate" made my "Best of 2008" list, and I'm guessing when I roll out my "Best of 2010" list, this one will be on it. Throwback? Oh yeah, no doubt. But damn! If you're gonna be a throwback sort of band, I don't think you can do it much better than these guys. I was fortunate enough to meet one of the members of the band a few years back at SXSW. He was a really gracious guy wearing a hat, but I don't remember his name. We were waiting in line for the bathroom I do believe (you meet quite a few interesting people waiting in line for coffee and/or bathrooms...just a side observation). I like when the members of a band are as cool as you hope them to be. But even if the dude would have been a total douchebag, I just may have forgiven him for the simple fact that I dig the music so much! I'm rambling, but hey, cut me some slack, I'm slightly out of practice here!

My point? Well, my point is that I really want to be inspired by music. I feel like it's happening less and less these days. And maybe that's partly due to the inevitability that is the aging process. Maybe it's because I have less and less time to listen to music. Maybe it's because there's too much to choose from. Maybe music is just worse than it used to be.

I still believe in it, though. Case in poing: Dr. Dog. Or the new Joanna Newsom. Or Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Wilco, Spoon, Vampire Weekend, or the odds and ends that still reach me on a level that The Beatles did when I was first discovering rock and roll music back in the '80s when actual '80s music wasn't reaching me.

And I'm rediscoving jazz. I used to be a jazz afficianado back when I actually played trombone in a college jazz group. Once I stopped playing, I kind of drifted away from Bird, Trane, Miles, and Mingus, but of late, I've slowly, but surely started rekindling that old flame. Sometimes music maybe temporarily dormant within us, but I'm convinced that the good stuff never really goes away.

So where does this leave me? What do I do with these observations? I'm hungry for discovery/re-discovery. I have over 10,000 songs in my iTunes collection, many of which I've never heard. Many of the songs I've probably just glossed over or forgotten or taken for granted. Maybe it's time to give each artist and each artist's individual works their proper due. Maybe it's time to listen to every single of the 10210 songs in the collection from A. A. Bondy to Zooey Deschanel. My iTunes library says that it would only take 28.6 days to do this...well of course that is if listening to music was the only thing I did during every waking second of those 28.6 days. So obviously, it's gonna take slightly longer.

The idea's probably not an original one. I'm sure some blogger/writer has done it and written about it, but really, I'm kind of doing it for myself. I really 1.) want to hear what I really have, 2.) want to be inspired by something I haven't noticed, 3.) want to maybe free up some space on my hard drive by deleting the crap...streamlining and simplifying life...never a bad thing. I'm partly inspired by the author, A. J. Jacobs, as well, who read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z and wrote about it (and lived to tell about it...an accomplishment in itself). Maybe I can come up with my own insights/observations on a much smaller scale about something a lot more interesting than encyclopedic knowledge.

Partly I want to do it too so I can give my writing a little direction as well. There's often simultaneously, and paradoxically, both too much and too little to write about. There's often just nothing that grabs me either on the micro or macro scale, at least enough so for me to actually sit down and write about it. But the thing is, I really, really, really do love music and I really do love writing too...so it seems the best way to consolidate the two loves is to undertake this silly, somewhat pointless exercise. As John Lennon once said, "Whatever gets you through the night..." I think most of life really is a silly, somewhat pointless exercise anyway, so I'm just doing what comes natural.

So the next entry will start off with A. A. Bondy's "Among the Pines" and we'll see what transpires as the songs slip by. There'll be a lot of Dylan to listen to, that's for damned sure. I'm sure there will be a lot of crap to sift through, as well. But I'm looking forward to those moments that light up the synapses in my brain that go crazy when good music finds its way from speaker to ear. May those moments be in abundance...for you as well.