Music

Today, while listening to Califone's deliciously off-kilter Roots and Crowns, I realized how many albums I love but rarely listen to anymore. I attribute this mostly to an unquenchable desire to hear everything new that comes out, and I attribute that desire to my part-time music-writer gig and the fact that this blog exists.

I certainly never get around to all of the stuff I want to hear, of course, but the aforementioned realization also led me to admit how absurd it is to have 55 records in my Top Albums of 2008. There's no way I could have listened to each of those 55 albums as many times as they deserved. And, there also seems to be a not-so-subtle relationship between the albums in my top 20 and the albums I was paid to review, since I felt more of a duty to spend more time with those records. (That is, while it may seem obvious that I would listen to the records in my top 20 most, maybe it's more accurate to say that I like the records in my top 20 most because I had to listen to them many times.)

Granted, I'll probably never experience albums in the same way I did as a high school sponge, which is a little sad, but I can still make a conscious effort to avoid iPod overload and spend more time with fewer albums. I'd like to be more choosy, explore old albums I forgot about and discover several musical forefathers I keep managing to gloss over in my search for what's glossy.