"They're safe," I said, "These are all safe picks, and nobody's going to learn anything from them." I was thinking about my five favourite albums of all time, and how they'd find right into any standard "best albums ever" compilation article, and, in and of themselves, say little about me.
I thought, at the beginning of the site, it would be useful to get out in the open my listening "background," to help contextualize my opinions by letting you know what music I already thought was great before I considered myself King Fuck of Blog Mountain. But the music I think is great is music most people already think is great, so knowing while album-X ranks third on my list isn't going to help you understand what I like so much about Lissie or Marble Index.
But I realized yesterday, it didn't matter if it helped you... it was going to help me.
Kids, I have been fried lately. While the main obstacle to review writing has been time -- I'm consumed with schoolwork and jobwork -- it's also a problem that when I do sit down to write, I agonize over my every word and usually hate the product. And while a certain amount of writer's angst is healthy, I was gradually losing sight of the ideas I had laid down as the basis of this blog back in January: to slap my filter on some music and say "I like this because..."
It can't apply to every album ever. Some of the albums I've reviewed are truly my thing. Some aren't, but I could recognize them as good and reviewed them anyway. There are some albums I've bought and then couldn't bring myself to write up because they just did nothing for me. It happens.
Yesterday I used a new pair of earbuds for the first time: Sennheisers, top-of-the-line stuff, instead of my cheapo JVCs. I was not prepared for the difference in sound when I tested them out with one of my "top 5s." It was a rare gift, to be able to hear something you've heard thousands of times since you were 15, with fresh ears. I wasn't hearing anything new, but all the familiar sounds had regained a sense of brightness and luster that had faded over time.
I don't rate my reviews, I don't pretend to make objective claims and I don't generally make ranked lists, but I'm about to write up my "Top Five Favourite Albums" of all time. (NB: Though the top two are locked in, the other three are rather changeable.) "I think it's great because ____" and "I love it because _____" are two related-but-separate statements, and as tempting as it always is to play impartial are go for the former, here is a case where the point is the latter. The central question will be, as I hope it usually is, "What does this do for me?" And when it's over, I will hopefully have trained myself to better keep an eye out for the answer to that question in albums I haven't been humming for a decade. And hopefully, if we're lucky, in the course of these five (excellent by any criteria) albums, I'll have made you think about something you hadn't before.
Hopefully, this helps me on my way developing the voice of this blog. Even if it doesn't, it's useful just to step back and think about what you know you like and try to remember why.
Keep on rockin'
-Scotto
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