If you know
me even slightly, you know that I like music a lot. If you don’t know me at all, well, you should
know that I like music a lot. I can play
all of three chords, which makes me more of a punk than a thrash metal
guitarist, but that’s beside the point; I can play by ear most of the time, so
I have that going for me (name the movie).
Every single
day I play the Location Game at work, where several of us play a lyric every single
day and I give awards on a weekly basis to the good, the bad, and the Carek (it’s
an inside joke, sorry. I’d tell you but
the first rule of The Council is you don’t talk about The Council. Drat, perhaps I have said too much).
I also
listen to music throughout the day. I am
at a point in life where I think that I know what I like and I tend to stick to
that. Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist
helps to expand my horizons somewhat, but in terms of new music I have become
my parents in some ways I am afraid. I
don’t think of it as a rut, but I know that there are a million artists that
have created a billion albums with a trillion songs that I will never
hear. Mostly I am OK with that.
But. There’s always that nagging feeling of
missing out on something. This weekend,
something wonderful happened!
My friend
got drunk and in a fit of enthusiastic shopping on Amazon bought me this for my
birthday:
What it is
is a sort of Nativity Calendar for music.
There are 100 albums on this poster.
Listen to one and you get to scratch off the album revealing an image
representing the album itself. It is in
fact pretty fucking sweet. My friend
knows me too well; after 28 years (NOT 30 as he recently professed, also while
possibly drunk but for sure while drinking) he bloody well better. This is like crack to me.
He had a
very simple hypothesis. Does Born To Run
sound the same when you are 44 as it did when you were 16? He’s right of course, but I do think it runs
deeper than that. When I was 16 I would
never have listened to Jolene. When I
was 22 I likely wouldn’t have listened to Nas.
Now? Hold my beer, I’m going in,
cause The Poster told me to.
There were
some minor logistical issues to work out before I started. Namely, where to start? Upper left hand
corner, working my way down until I hit the lower right? That’s not very fucking rock and roll, now is
it? No way, man, this must be random, or
as random as I can make it. I’ll close
my eyes and pick an album, then another, then another until I have 5 in
queue. When I listen to those, I’ll pick
five more.
What follows
is a review of each of the albums as I listen to them. In some cases, it is a play by play (or song
by song) stream of consciousness in others it’ll be what I got out of it after
it was all over and I had time to write about it. In all cases, this is a review of 100 “bucket
list” albums by a forty something guy. Some
of these are near and dear to me already, others I have always wanted to hear
but never took the time to do so. Still
others I haven’t a clue what I am in for.
Albums 1-5
Albums 6-10
Albums 11-15
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