6/22/08 – 157. Always on My Mind – Phantom Planet
This past Tuesday morning, as I began a mindless task at work, an innocuous email appeared in my inbox from Amanda’s work email address. “A Mission,” the header read. The text of the email was simple and direct: “I have begun to listen to every song on my iPod in alphabetical order. No skipping.” This would be no simple mission. For Amanda and her thirty gig pod, she would have approximately 1,750 songs to go through. Luckily for her, she mainly only uploads albums which she thoroughly enjoys. She also left most of her music collection in Britain after a failed relationship a couple of years ago. So, 1,750 songs is still enough to take up a good portion of her summer (if not more so).
Still, when I saw this mission in my inbox, I decided to try to rise to the challenge. However, my task would be a bit more challenging. Due to a chance encounter with another local musician in the Apple store, I got sold an 80 gig iPod a week before my long trip to California about a year and a half ago (by the aforementioned local musician, rather than the usual pudgy-Buddy-Holly-glasses-wearing-indie-kid iPod salesman). The ensuing year and a half, I was able to upload my entire CD collection (no simple task). I believe last year’s summer project was largely what caused my old computer to crash, although it probably had something to do with the fact that it was a 1998 computer rebuilt in 2002, and largely neglected. Still, on my new laptop (and the attached external hard drive), I uploaded my iTunes collection, a slim 7526 songs, and a couple of spare music videos that came with some random albums.
That Tuesday, I had left my dependable headphones at home. I was on my backup headphones, a cheapo white apple knockoff from a Penn Station Kmart, purchased mainly for it’s slightly convenient carrying case, rather than for actual listening. They never really fit right, but this is why they’re the spare headphones. Still, I went to Music > Songs > All, and pressed that fateful center button. 1 of 7526 came up. The A Train by Statue of David. They were an unknown band someone recommended to me, which I never really liked. A song I never really worked out my feelings for before. I had recently heard this song after having it for a good couple of years and never really paying attention to it. Just last week, I reheard it, to reexpose me to it, and finally realized that the reason why I never really wanted to hear that song, was because the chorus directly negated the point of the verses, but not in an ironic or smart way. I had the sinking feeling that the first song on my alphabetical ipod experiment was a subversive Christian techno emo song. This was not a good start.
Three songs in, I have the first positive emotions that a familiar song can stir up. AM 180 by Granddaddy. The song that caused me to borrow Chris Hill’s entire Grandaddy collection in high school. Grandaddy was a band that was always a Chris Hill band, probably his favorite band, and my high school group had spent a good number of afternoons in his basement, listening to Grandaddy and Ben Lee, prior to next big thing blogs in the late nineties. This song sold me on Grandaddy, and unfortunately they rarely lived up to the infectious pop hooks of this song (Now It’s On being the exception to this Grandaddy clause). It made me long for the days of driving around with the windows down and listening to Grandaddy and the Shins (quietly and all the way through) before Natalie Portman and Zach Braff decided that it would change my life.
That Tuesday night, I had the idea of making this summer listening project into some post-modern existential blog or something, that would document the songs on my iPod, and dig a little deeper into what it means in this day and age, to have the ability to store over a month’s worth of listening hours in a little rectangle about the size of your hand. It’s a scary, insurmountable feeling, knowing that you may never get to songs that start with Z’s, numbers or weird symbols made of punctuation if you remain true to the concept of this project. It also means that we have additional reason to hold off on uploading additional content to our iPods, until we get through the list. This is a sinking feeling, as there are new albums by My Morning Jacket and Coldplay that are supposed to be breaking all of their previous molds, that would bear in depth iPod listening. And that’s just this week’s potential purchases. Needless to say, the Elbow album which sat side by side to My Morning Jacket at Virgin also merited purchase (definitely over Coldplay, even if Brian Eno was producing them). You could definitely understand my frustrations.
Let me clarify by admitting this fact right off of the bat. I am an unabashed music geek, and have surrounded myself with it throughout my life. Considering all of the other types of vices or habits, it’s not such a bad vice to have. I easily could obsess over many other topics, including video games, recreational drugs, coin collecting, or the collected works of Neitzche. However, I consider music to be a noble pursuit, and a worthy donation of my money in the middle of this slippery recession.
As for coming straight home and blog about this new great experiment, it was not meant to be this past Tuesday. I had an employee showcase to play later than night, an added perk of working in Manhattan’s music industry. To be honest, writing an epic blog about all of the songs on my iPod is probably the last thing I should be doing, but screw it, it’ll be fun. I’m currently finishing up my June mini-tour of New York City, playing four shows within a two week span (last Tuesday night in Chelsea at Jake’s Saloon, two sets yesterday in the East Village, and then Williamsburg the next weekend). Also, this past month I’ve made the quarter life crises decision to go back to school for business, in some twisted form of deciding to pursue my dream of making a living in the music business. I’ll get into that one a little bit later, I’m sure. Still it meant that last weekend was spent taking the GMATs, and the month before was largely spent trying to remember math that was not applicable since high school. Not as much fun as listening to your iPod straight through.
So between the three sets in the past five days, and a company softball game on Thursday (being a music industry company, our team is the Megahurtz. Needless to say, in a league of law firms and financial types, our win column is very low frequency), this is the first time I am finally getting to write about this alphabetical experience. As we speak, the second go round of Simon and Garfunkel’s America is on. It took me all of Thursday night’s train ride to get through my Alls (as well as All of Friday, a busy day at work), Friday was Almost and the rest of the Al’s, and now I’m in the middle of America. I just transitioned to American Gigolo by Weezer, a somewhat startling transition, although coming from Simon and Garfunkel, most songs would be.
I recently passed the Amanda section of my iPod, which was jarringly slim. Not that many songs named Amanda, hardly any at all. I have three times as many Allisons on my iPod than I have Amanda’s, and even that is an Amanda Cecilia (a live Elliott Smith B Side found in the deep recesses of the internet, through some similarly obsessed fan site). To be fair most of those Alison’s are from the Pixies song, so technically that doesn’t count, right? Note to self, work on a better song than my first attempt at immortalizing my girlfriend’s name in song, to add to this paltry list.
We haven’t fully established the ground rules for this mission. For repeats of songs, do you skip, or do you soldier through? I began the soldier through approach, but I’ll admit listening to Across the Universe for two hours, while continuously pausing to answer phone calls at work, was certainly not the point of this mission. However, after much debate between Amanda and myself, we determined that if a song was a live version or a cover of the song, then it must not be skipped. However, if it was an exact duplicate master recording, it does have permission to be skipped. For everyone’s sanity involved. Otherwise by the time this thing ends, we’ll all be across the universe (or maybe that will just be me).
Wow. I heart Gogol Bordello. I always forget that. American Wedding by Gogol may be the best song in the American section, and I have never heard this before. Wow. How could this have happened. To be fair, Gogol may not be for everyone. But the lyrical nature and vitrol in their music making makes me kind of warm inside, especially their biting criticism of American culture. This song must have been the cornerstore of Super Taranta! How have I not noticed this song before?
So, it’s been determined, that covers must be heard, live versions as well (no matter how poor the bootleg sound), but if a song is on the Greatest Hits and the original album, it’s optional whether you want to hear the song again and again, in a row. No need for Greatest Hits fatigue. Although judging by that standard, you probably could have listened to that song many more times in a row five years (or thirty five technically, depending on the song) when it first came out on the radio. Ahh the days of mixtapes and radio deejays. Sigh.
I’m ending this post with Ben Lee’s Against Me cover song Americans Abroad, twenty songs later. 177 out of 7526. And by the time I’ve read it over, and made my basic spelling, grammer, edit check, I’m on 183 of 7526, Amputations by Death Cab For Cutie. Keep it up Matt, Amanda’s getting towards the B’s…
