The joys of systematic music listening

I have to admit, I am a sucker for different projects. Be they some stupid list of best of this and that in a crappy magazine, do this and that before you die, you name it. But my current project is the least reasonable and ambitious of them all: I am listening my entire music collection in an alphabetical order. This includes everything: lp's, cd's, singles, compilations, even my cd-r:s (which include five shoeboxes faithfully copied from library cd's).

The project has now lasted around 1,5 years and currently I am in Coldplay. Yes, Coldplay. Which brings me to the exhibitionist part of the project. I am posting to Facebook the picture of the cover of each record or more often, a Spotify-link to the album, so my FB-friends can see where I am going. As only part of my FB-friends are interested in music, this must be a drag for them. Then again, every now and then there are interesting discussions related to these postings (say, the entire output of the Cure - which is best, which is worst, which is the best cover etc.) and as many of my "friends" are much younger and more hipster than me, I grin when I think of the schock some of my records cause to them (this concerns especially my colleagues in the rock magazine I write for).

This is the external part. But the internal part is much more rewarding. I think it is interesting to hear the entire output of an artist or a band in a fairly short time. It brings out the development or decline (of course I listen only to the albums I own and I usually do not own the ones I consider flops, but there are exceptions to this) of the artist and gets you into the world of the artist. Perhaps one can compare this to systematic reading of the texts of say, some thinker, when you are trying to get inside someone's head.

While this works sometimes, it does not work always. First, I cannot work when I am listening to music which reduces my album listening to 1-2 albums per day. Second, this is so huge a project (estimated time 5 years) that I would be an idiot to listen only these albums. So I listen new stuff (I am writing reviews, so there are "compulsory" listening periods of new albums) and when I buy records, I listen then right after shopping. So when the list of releases from an artists such as Dylan is long, listening to it might take a month or more and it can be too much in one go.

But on the whole, I am satisfied I am doing this. It gives you perspective on your record collection which, if it consists more than few dozens of records, is not always well-remembered. My collection consists of around 3500 records, so there is stuff which I have almost forgotten. So in a sense this project is a revelation. At the same time it works as an inventory - last week I listened 461 Ocean Boulevard by Eric Clapton and I had forgotten how slow and boring it was - Slowhand, indeed! So off to shop it goes. Of course sometimes the project gets a bit tedious, but I can always put it to halt for a few weeks and start again where I left off. As I am very stubborn, I intend to see this thing through. But I will return to the topic in a few years, let us see at what state I am in then.