I Couldn't Make This Stuff Up

This morning I kicked off my Saturday with Jandek’s “Foreign Keys,” not because I love Jandek so much I simply can’t get enough even after 10 installments of Interstellar Discussion, but simply because that was the next album in the queue. Que? Well, if we’re going to be talking so much about music obsessions, perhaps the best place to start is how we listen.

Now, I have an inkling that the way I listen is entirely different than the way 99% of the populace listens to music. Like all listeners, I believe I have a tendency toward regression – playing the same records and songs over and over – and I have devised a rather neurotic scheme to overcome my favoritism.

Every Sunday morning, after my shower and before my coffee, I visit random.org, where I randomly select an integer between 1 and 18, corresponding to the number of playlists in my iTunes. These playlists include my entire library, three general playlists, unplayed tracks, radio (internet or ‘real’), and several artist-specific playlists. When I have generated the integer, that corresponding playlist becomes my ‘background music’ for the week (this week: 6 = Bob Dylan). I keep a catalog of the eight most-recently played lists, and don’t repeat a playlist until the eight weeks are up (also corresponding to how frequently I wash my duvet cover, if you’re interested).

My album queue is drawn from my entire list of shows and albums, which I keep in a Word document. I’ve divided up longer anthologies to avoid fatigue (all four discs of Billy Joel’s box set at once might give me a brain aneurism), but for the most part I like to keep all titles intact as a single selection. Rather than regenerating the queue weekly like the playlist, I simply create a new one when the previous queue has been exhausted. Again, I go to random.org, this time selecting the Sequence Generator instead of the Integer Generator, and used the first 10 integers in the sequence out of 168, the current number of ‘unlistened albums’ in the document.

This isn’t to say, of course, that I have never heard any of these remaining 168 albums in their entirely (the original Word document was well over 300), but simply that they haven’t been placed in the queue yet. I usually listen to an album completely several times after I buy it, and most from my high school and junior high days have been played to death through my older music listening schemes (I have employed many throughout the past decade).

This installment of the queue, per usual, had an even mix of Jandek (a 51 titles kind of stacks the ‘unlistened music’ list), live shows (which comprise 40% of my library) and Wilco/Wilco-related music (the band and Jeff Tweedy alone are 30% of my library). In this queue:

1. The Rocks Crumble – Jandek
2. The Showbox: 1998-09-16 – Elliott Smith
3. Side 4 – Ryan Adams (the bonus disc to the album Gold)
4. Brooklyn Wednesday – Jandek
5. Not So Soft – Ani Difranco
6. Bootleg Series Vol. 5: 1975 Rolling Thunder Review – Bob Dylan
7. The Fillmore: 2000-07-29 – Wilco
8. The Giant Pin – Nels Cline Singers
9. 2004-02-07 – The Autumn Defense
10. Wesbeth Theater: 1996-03-30 – Elliott Smith

When explaining a similar method I use to choose and renew passwords for various Internet sites to a co-worker, he laughed and said that I do it in this convoluted way because I enjoy the process more than I find it helpful, and I would agree that this is true. On the other hand, I also believe that one should listen to albums the way one might read a book or watch a movie, and what’s a better way to do that than a randomly chosen queue? The playlist of the week was something I began to use when I was buying lots of new music, and wanted to make sure that new artists were played on their own for a week so I could get into the music.

So, I thought I would close this post with how this scheme allows me to revisit music I haven’t heard in a while/et cetera, but basically I do it because I enjoy the process of selecting the albums, taking a break from Wilco/Sleater-Kinney/Silver Jews, and sometimes there really doesn’t need to be a moral to the story. Random.org!