• Mood: full of chili and ramen
• Music: Cort and Fatboy

And now, music

Music thoughts. I think I'll share music thoughts.

First off, thanks, rafaela and slipjig: I've done my first listens of the three CDs you burned for me, and they are very comfortable -- heck, shall I say, comforting -- listens. They make me smile. I won't yet single out favorite tracks, but the discs...they comprise a nice, happy, well-rounded listening experience.

(Crap, it's been years since I've written music reviews. It shows!)

More music thoughts: Each weekday morning, I spend a few minutes scanning my two CD racks and the pile of most recently-bought CDs (stacked on top of a speaker), trying to decide on two, three or four discs to take with me to work. I don't usually listen to all of them in the office; sometimes I listen to none, because I'm too busy listening to dictations or the radio shows and features I like. One rack is mostly film scores, much of that collected from used-music stores in the Nineties, plus a handful of classical/orchestral stuff; the other rack is my rock-song rack, actual albums not related to films. My film score collection is still the larger part, but more like 55% of it and no longer 80%. Yeah, I collected a lot of film scores.

One of the ways I'm old-fashioned: I like albums, I like the shape of a well-programmed album. And I know it's tough to program an album. As much as I like Radiohead's OK Computer, I'm not as caught up in the album's back half as I am in the wonders of the first half; sometimes I listen only as far as the track with the computer voice ("Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much...") and stop. On to the next disc, whatever it is. Might be Nirvana's Unplugged in New York; might be Randy Newman's Faust (maybe the only opera with swearing!). I hear music industry people say that albums are almost certainly not going to be significant anymore, and that we'll be back in a singles-dominated music industry like in the late Fifties/Sixties; but I cling to the well-constructed albums, which still happen, like Muse's Black Holes and Revelations. Burning discs, like mix tapes back in the day, is a related art. rafaela and slipjig seem still to have that talent. Sweet.

(Trivia! I'm amused that the 1994 Tori Amos lyric "Now Greg here writes letters and burns his CDs" has a different meaning now, only 14 years after she wrote it.)

Is there a point? Sometimes there's no point. To misquote Donovan, "First there was a point/ Then there wasn't a point/ Then there was." (Y'know, I've never heard that song; I only know it by reputation.)

This has been rambling.