Emily's Albums A to Z

Since I’m about a fifth of the way through the alphabet, I thought I would throw out some musings on the project so far.

The World Cup period is hindering the number of albums I listen to in one day, since I usually listen to the 11:30 game while I’m working, which takes a big chunk of listening time out of the day. When the World Cup finishes that means I can listen to a heavier load, but I’m not looking forward to that much writing. I might purposely scale back to keep it manageable on the writing (and reading, for that matter) side.

The volume levels of CDs vary to a great degree, especially those transferred unremastered to CD at the beginning of the CD era (Dylan, The Doors, Pink Floyd). Speaking of which, when are they going to remaster all the Dylan albums? That seems way overdue. And I mean regular CDs, not that SACD crap.

Every time I think of an album I’ll be excited to comment about when I get to it, I realize it starts with an R or an S and therefore it will be a long time until I can comment! Hopefully I will still have good things to say by the time I get there.

Probably after I’ve finished the project I will go back and review albums I have on vinyl only, plus some albums starting with A that I missed ripping until the project was at the letter B (Ágætis Byrjun and After Bathing at Baxter’s specifically bummed me out to have missed).

Anecdotally, more people are keeping up with reading my entries than I expected, but I’d love to see more commentary and discussion amongst my readers. And please pass it on to anyone you think would enjoy reading music writing.

Overall, I am really enjoying the project, and it has made me get back in touch with good writing habits. Though I’m pretty sure I could do a lot better with crispness and clarity much of the time. I’m having a lot of fun doing something I enjoy, despite the workload. It’s been a while.