A few months ago, John posted something on Facebook about how he was going to revisit his entire CD collection be listening to every single one of them in alphabetical order. I thought this was a brilliant idea, and would be exactly the kind of thing I'd try if I didn't have an obscene number of complete albums in my library, between the CDs and digital downloads. I told him I'd hope he'd keep us posted on his progress and what he learned about himself along the way. After a few of his updates, I knew I'd want him to write about the experience for my annual May guest post. Happily he obliged.
Take it away, J Buddy....
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In February I began a quest to listen to all of my CDs in alphabetical order – all 161 of them. I have now progressed to the end of the H’s. It should be going more quickly than this, but I got out of the habit of listening to CDs at home. My stereo system had been in storage for the past 10 years, since we decided its presence in our basement family room was too 1980s. Then my boombox stopped working and the little radio/CD player that my daughters got me for Christmas a couple of years ago suffered a similar fate. I don’t think I’m that hard on them; maybe it’s just bad luck? If you were an attorney, you probably would have said, “Objection…relevance?” by now. But I just wanted to explain why it has taken so long.
In the first 2 ½ months, there have been some painful moments. I used to belong to a music service, and I would often get offers like, “Buy one at regular price and get up to three more for $3.99 each.” So, I’d stretch my purchasing to CDs I wouldn’t normally buy for regular price. This is the only way I can justify buying Paula Adbul’s "Forever Your Girl" or All 4 One. More recently, I suffered through "Gloria Estefan’s Greatest Hits," and last night, returning from Minneapolis, I had the misfortune to rediscover a CD titled "Inspirational Country & Bluegrass."
Tom asked me to relate what I have learned as I go through this. The main thing I've learned is this...for most of my music listening life, I have been a complete Top 40 whore. With a few exceptions, if I have a group's CD, it's because they had 3 or more Top 40 hits and thought themselves popular enough to make a greatest hits CD. I’ve listened to collections from Abba, Air Supply, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Pat Benatar, Berlin, Blondie The B-52s, Boston, and that’s just through the Bs. The funny thing is that when I go back and listen to some of these “greatest hits” CDs, I invariably run across songs that I never remember hearing. I’ve also learned that I have had (and still have) a variety of music listening moods, which is probably not unlike most people.
In about 1990, I realized that most of the music on the Top 40 didn't really appeal to me anymore, so I went through two exploratory phases, aided by my membership in the music service. For the next 6 or 7 years, I became a fan of certain country music artists (usually those that had some crossover to the Top 40) and I delved into the genre of contemporary Christian music. Of course, even during those years, if one of my favorite groups -- like ELO, Hall & Oates, Toto, or Chicago – produced a new CD, I would put aside my boots and my crucifix and get back to my roots. I’m not entirely sure why I moved away from Top 40 music at that time. I seem to remember thinking that most of the songs written in the early 90s were mostly just conglomerations of clichés strung together to fill 3-4 minutes of time combined with uninteresting, unimaginative musical compositions. It may have also been caused by the fact that the songs about love and sex were getting more and more explicit, instead of trying to be clever and insinuating sexual things without saying them. Boyz II Men, for example, performed a song titled, “I’ll Make Love to You.” The song didn’t go into graphic detail or anything, but it also didn’t leave anything to the imagination of the listener. Also in the early 90s, Whitney Houston cut a single remake of “I Will Always Love You”, which won a whole bunch of awards, including Billboard’s Record of the Year AND was at the top of Billboard’s Top 40 for 14 weeks!! Don’t get me wrong…I thought she did a nice job with the song. But it was a remake, for Pete’s sake. The only way a remake could make THAT much impact is if there wasn’t much else out there worth listening to.
So, I started listening to Garth Brooks, Lorrie Morgan, Billy Dean, Collin Raye, and other country artists who had some good songwriters working for them to come up with different ways to write about love, breakups, and such. I was also getting involved in church music at the time, and that may have motivated me to check out a contemporary Christian sampler CD. I bought a couple of CDs based on the songs I liked the best from that sampler, and then got enough recommendations from other people to fill about six years of musical void.
One consequence of this experience has been remembering past concerts and life moments. One week of my listening was mostly Chicago – seven CDs in all. Listening to Chicago brought back fond memories of concerts I attended with my childhood friend and college roommate Dave. In all, Dave and I attended at least six concerts together, one of which was Chicago back in 1987. The other time I saw Chicago was one of the first concerts I went to with my wife. It's true that I became a big fan of Chicago in the mid 80s, and that my favorite albums were 17, 18 and 19. But as I listened to them this time, I realized that Chicago's truly best songs are their older, jazzier stuff. "Just You 'n' Me," "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is," "Make me Smile," etc. Before Chicago, there was a healthy dose of Garth Brooks (from my aforementioned Country Phase) and three CDs from Michael Card (one of my favorite comtemporary Christian artists). As I listened to Garth, I remembered fondly my experience of singing lead on "Friends in Low Places" with my cousins' band at a wedding last summer. Our cousin Dan tried to get me to "channel my inner Garth," but alas, try as I might, I don't think anyone really bought me as a redneck.
Lastly, you might think that 161 is plenty of CDs. So do I. But as I have listened to the music, it helped me remember songs I don’t have (and wish I had), or favorite artists that I only know from their hits. The Eagles, for example, are one of my favorite groups, but I only have one of their CDs that isn’t a greatest hits compilation.
So, maybe I need more?
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