5.1.09
My wife is out of town this weekend, so I've got a couple of projects I want to tackle with no distractions. The music-related one is trying to get all of the CDs in my collection into iTunes, which is a pretty massive project. Everything I've bought since 2003 has been loaded, and selected other CDs from my collection have been added, but I'd guess that at least half of my collection has yet to be converted to digital files (which generally means that at least half of my collection has gone unlistened to since 2003). I have no idea how long this project will take, but it needs to be done and this weekend is as good a time as any to get it started.

5.4.09
Wow. I was loading CDs into iTunes pretty much nonstop while I was at the computer this weekend, and I'm nowhere near done. As of right now, I've just barely gotten into the E's, which appears to be just over a quarter of my collection.

I can't stand not finishing this. There's not a whole lot going on at work this week, and certainly nothing that I couldn't do working from home, but I don't think I can sell this project as a reason not to come into the office. I'll keep plugging away in the evenings, but I'm guessing this effort will end up taking several weeks with the relatively minimal amount of attention I'll be able to give it compared to this past weekend.

And I know this is heresy, because the Cure's "Close to Me" is pretty much a pefect pop song, but the version from Mixed Up is kinda amazing too.

5.5.09
I don't think I was consciously aware of how many House of Love albums there were or how many I owned. And the only song I can recall without going back to listen to them is "Beatles and the Stones", which I still like. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with this digitization effort: there so much stuff I haven't listened to in so long. I wonder how much of it I'll still like once I've got it all in iTunes and I start working through it.

5.6.09

Dear local record store manager,

Even though it's likely that your entire industry is doomed and your store will cease to exist sometime in the next decade, let me tell you why you specifically will cease to exist sooner than many of your competitors. For the second time this year, I showed up at your door on Tuesday ready to spend $70-$100 only to find that you had closed at 5:30 to do inventory. Inventory. On a Tuesday——i.e., the day that new DVDs and CDs are released, and almost certainly not your slowest sales day on average.

Here's a suggestion: if you have to do inventory during normal hours (don't most stores do this after regular business hours?), at least be smart enough to pick your slowest sales night, which I'm guessing would be a Monday, and not a day when people are likely to come looking for new releases because, well, you know, the releases really are brand new because they've just hit store shelves that day.

And how often do you do inventory anyway? When I was locked out in January of this year, I figured it was maybe your big annual inventory project, and that was the reason you were closing early. But seeing it again now means you're likely doing it at least quarterly, if not monthly. Does not having to stay a few hours late every 1-3 months make up for all the revenue (and goodwill) you're losing when customers get turned away starting at 5:30 when you are normally open until 9?

I'd love to support a local independent music retailer, but you sure do make it hard sometimes, between your poor selection and your baffling early closings for inventory. I should just bite the bullet and start ordering all my CDs off Amazon, or really take the plunge and become a download-only consumer.

5.7.09
I like to use Twitter occasionally because I can use the iPhone app to moblie blog in a way that updates both my main site and my Facebook page, but I haven't really gotten that into it——I don't have many followers, and I'm not following many people. One person I do follow: Kristin Hersh, the primary force behind Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave. She tweets constantly, but she's never boring, and she's got a sly, self-depricating sense of humor.

I know celebrities on Twitter is all the rage now (and I know she's not really a celebrity compared to those who have jumped on the bandwagon recently), but she's been doing this for over a year now, when Twitter was still unknown to all but the early adopters. Even if you don't know who she is or don't like her music, you should still give her feed a chance, but if you're a fan, it's a wonderfully uncensored peek into the daily life of a working musician and single mom.

5.8.09
Sometimes with older CDs in my collection, the CD drive in my computer has trouble reading the final track or two on a disc, and I'm forced to make a decision: sacrifice that track or go and re-purchase something I already own on iTunes to make the digital album complete. So far I've only decided to buy two tracks: "Feel Every Beat" from Electronic's eponymous debut album, and "Disappointed", the closing track from Morrissey's Bona Drag (weird that these two both have a strong Smiths connection; Morrissey is obvious, but Electronic was a collaboration between members of the Pet Shop Boys, New Order, and Johnny Marr).

There has also been one case where I wanted to purchase a track but it wasn't available on iTunes: "Bo Diddley Is Jesus" from the Jesus and Mary Chain's collection of rarities and b-sides, Barbed Wire Kisses. It doesn't seem to be on Amazon, either, so it looks like my only option is to repurchase the entire album and hope that the new copy won't have the same problem. As much as I love that song (the title can't be beat), I'm unwilling to shell out $15+ even if I had a 100% guarantee that the new CD would read properly in my CD drive, so until they make that track available digitally, I guess I'm going to have to live without it.

5.11.09
Dropped by the record store over the weekend and picked up a few of the things that I tried to pick up last Tuesday when the store closed early for inventory: Art Brut's Art Brut vs. Satan, Boy Least Likely To's The Best Party Ever, MGMT's Oracular Spectacular, and Ben Harper's White Lies for Dark Times.

I haven't really listened to much of it, even the Art Brut, because I'm so busy catching up on stuff from my collection (I can't believe I haven't listened to Miracle Legion in five years), but I'm going to try to give each of them a spin in the next couple of days.

5.12.09
Here's what I think I want from Ben Harper: a record that's 10 tracks worth of "Faded" without the extended musical interlude in the middle of that song. I keep buying his records hoping for that, and I'm always disappointed. Still, every one of his records has some listenable tracks, and there's nothing too terrible, so he never makes it to my list of artists who I should give up on.

Basically I think I'm doomed to a life of owning all of Harper's catalog without ever truly becoming a fan. I think the more common name for this affliction is Ryan Adams Syndrome.

5.13.09
I can't make up my mind about the new Art Brut record. I wrote a pretty long entry about it, the gist of which was that it sucked because of the production, but then I listened to it a couple of times on my computer sound system (I had mostly been listening in the car), and my complaints about the production went away, apparently a function of my car's sound system (although I don't notice this great a disparity between home and car with other records).

Even if it does grow on me, it's still likely going to rank a solid third out of the three albums they've made so far. I still love Eddie Argos, but he needs to come up with some new topics. There was some growth in that area on the last album, but from what I've heard so far, it's all old loves, old records, and drunken nights out.

5.14.09
Taking another trip down to the 9:30 Club in DC tonight to see the Shins. We saw them a few years ago opening for the White Stripes at Merriweather-Post, and it was a really lackluster performance. I'm hoping that tonight's show in a more intimate venue will be a better experience, and that maybe I'll hear something different than the straight album versions of their songs because of the two newly added band members (frontman and songwriter James Mercer recently replaced the longtime drummer and keyboardist).

5.15.09
More details later, but I came out of the Shins show last night liking the band better than I did going in. That's always a sign of a great show.

5.18.09
The digitization of my CD collection is coming along nicely. I'm at the S's now, and with time off later this week (commencement is on Thursday, so that's a forced holiday that replaces what would be a floating holiday for people on my campus, and most people take Friday off as well to make a five day weekend out of it), I should be able to finish it off before Memorial Day. Now I just have to find some time to listen to it all again...

5.19.09
I've finally managed to get the Screaming Blue Messiahs' Gun Shy into my digital collection after years of trying. I bought the very-hard-to-find CD on eBay more than a decade ago, and although the disc has always played fine in conventional CD players, the process would always choke on the fourth of fifth track when I tried to rip it into a digital format.

It still did that on my most recent try (I usually try whenever we get a new computer, but this big digitization project was the first time I tried with my latest machine), but I was able to skip past the trouble area and rip all of the later tracks in the album. When I finished, there was only one track I was missing, and I decided that pulling it from a torrent was the best solution. It took a while to find an active seed, but I eventually did, and now that record is finally complete and listenable on my normal devices after a long absence. And it still kicks ass.

5.20.09
The new iPod shuffles are unbelievably tiny. I say that every time I see a new model, and I also say that I can't believe that Apple will be able to make them any smaller in the next revision, but I'm proven wrong every time they refresh the line. Really, though, they are so tiny now that if you made them any smaller they'd be unusable by humans unless you contained the entire device in the earbuds. I'll be very curious to see if they do anything to the form factor next time, or if the next model will just include more memory, etc.

5.26.09
Not quite done with the CD library digitization project, but I'm close——only two more shelves left to check and possibly rip. I've now decided that when I have a track or an entire CD that doesn't extract correctly to get it from a torrent instead of paying iTunes for something that I've already paid for the right to listen to.S

S o far, the only complete record I've had to download is Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque——iTunes couldn't rip any of the songs on my CD copy for some reason——but I'm considering downloading Throwing Muses' The Fat Skier EP, which I don't have a CD copy of, but which I did used to own on cassette (the only CD version is apparently an import version of House Tornado that also includes the EP). That's about as far as I'm willing to go with downloading music from P2P networks these days though (with one pretty big exception that I'll talk about tomorrow).

5.27.09
My one recent exception to my policy of not downloading torrents of music I haven't paid for: my recent acquisition of Danger Mouse's and Sparklehorse's collaboration Dark Night of the Soul. Their idiot record company EMI is blocking the release of the album, and a quote from the Danger Mouse on the official site says this:

Danger Mouse is hugely proud of Dark Night of the Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is.

That, to me, is an open invitation from the artist to download the music, and I'm not quite sure who else's permission I really need (EMI isn't commenting on the specifics of their beef with the project, saying only that they are working to resolve the situation while preserving their rights).

This is similar to my response to Danger Mouse's first big project, the also-never-released-by-EMI mashup of the Beatles' The White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album titled The Grey Album. Jay-Z actively encouraged these types of mashups by releasing an a capella version of The Black Album (and indeed, mashups featuring everyone from Prince to Metallica to Pavement appeared alongside Danger Mouse's project). I figured, hey, I already own The White Album (where Danger Mouse drew all his non-Jay-Z samples from), and Jay-Z seemed to be encouraging other musicians to remix and release his stuff, so exactly how was this illegal? (Not to mention the fact that Danger Mouse wasn't selling The Grey Album, he was releasing it for free as an art project. In fact, you can still download The Grey Album at the Illegal Art web site; they were threatened with legal action by EMI at one point, but the record company eventually backed down, demonstrating that they have some understanding of how weak their position.)

I don't know what the specific issues are with Dark Night of the Soul, and it's possible that the law may be clearly on EMI's side this time, but since neither side is talking, I've assumed that they are just being dicks again and downloaded the album. If it ever gets released officially, I'll be happy to pay for it, and if it doesn't, well, it kinda deserves to be heard (in addition to the fact that it's a full album of new songs from Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse, it also features tons of indie superstar guest vocalists, from the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne to the Shins' James Mercer to the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, among many others).

5.28.09
There's a new Modest Mouse single and b-side out on iTunes, but I'm not sure I can convince myself to buy them. On first listen they sound more intriguing than anything off of their most recent record, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, but not by much.

"Satellite Skin", the actual single, is a mellow, radio-ready track that has a decent chance to become another semi-annual summer hit for them. "Guilty Cocker Spaniels" is the b-side, and it sounds like one, but it could have also easily been one of the less memorable tracks from their most recent album (which makes sense, because these two songs are a preview of their upcoming EP, which is comprised of songs that didn't quite make the cut for We Were Dead).

5.29.09
So it looks like Andy Partridge from XTC has a column in his local newspaper, the Swindon Advertiser. It doesn't appear to have been updated since last fall, but the archives are fun. Going to keep an eye on this one to see if he starts it up again. It's probably too much to hope that the reason he has stopped the column is because he's busy in the studio, but one can dream...