distributedlife

This all started after reading 31 Songs by Nick Hornby. The book was a great concept and I wanted to do the same thing. To express my love of music by writing about it. To try and explain why I loved a song. That to me is going to be the hard part, explaining my emotions behind the experience of listening to music. Ideally I want you to go and find the music (legally preferably) and have a listen for yourself. I made an attempt at each of the different artists in 31 Songs. Of the ones I didn’t already listen to, only Aimee Mann stuck and I’ll get to her at some point during the year. Some of the artists I was already familiar with and in some cases I had a love of the song Nick was writing about. I think that one new artist from 31 is a good enough conversion rate. If after reading my own experiences you find one song in the entire catalogues of the artists I will eventually talk about, I will be happy.

What not a top 10?

I love statistics, I always have. Statistics allow us to understand and control information. We can slice information in such a way that it makes sense to us. That is why everyone likes a top ten list. It shows us information in such a way we can understand. Led Zeppelin is better than Pink Floyd. The problem is that statistics only provide a quantitative view of information or the information is sliced so fine we don’t understand the context of the information. Why is Led Zeppelin better than Pink Floyd? I don’t know. I made those choices up to illustrate the third problem behind statistics and the cause of the first two problems. What is the motivation behind the person that is creating the statistics? They are determining what we understand by what they show us.

To me, the love of music is entirely a qualitative experience. That is to say that the justification behind why I love a song or artist is entirely driven by my subjective opinion and nothing else. As Nick said in his first chapter the songs listed here are not songs tied to a particular memory or moment in my life. They are songs that have lasted the duration of his life. I’m still young, so I can’t say that these songs have stayed my favourite over a long period of my life.

The songs I will write about are the songs that have some deeper meaning to the lyrics. In some cases I may not be able to express what that meaning is. When I find a song that strikes a chord I listen to it to death. Over and over again sometimes it’s the only song in the repeating playlist. I once read that we listen to a song on repeat until we understand it. I think this is the case sometimes and the other times are when a song just feels so right. It accompanies us throughout our lives. It matches our mood regardless of what we are feeling. I’m going to talk about these songs.

In some cases I am going to talk about more than just the songs. Sometimes there isn’t one song but an album that moves me. In other cases it is just about everything they do and I don’t want to pick a favourite.

The 52 weeks will not include repeats of artists even though I have more than one story behind some of the groups. Each story will be scheduled for release at just after midnight on Saturday night (making it very early Sunday morning). I thought about when I wanted these stories to come out. Each one has to come out weekly and how you read it is somewhat important to me.

For me the best time to read it is on Sunday morning. You get up and grab your netbook and head on to the porch or next to the freshly stoked fire. Coffee in hand, it could be winter, it could be summer. You bring up your feed reader and get the latest little offering from me. Sometimes you read the story first before putting on the CD or visiting YouTube to get a listen. Other times you will see the title and already know what I am going to say. You’ll read it anyway because it’s always good to find someone that feels the same way about the song you love. Other times I’ll see it in a different light. In all cases you will put on the song, maybe two or three songs of the album that have to be played together whenever you hear them.

One thing you will notice about all of these stories is that I love each and every track that I write about. I’m not here to gripe and groan about the latest pop tart or the underground group that has now gone commercial. I’m here to talk about music in the only way that music should be, subjectively and with passion. There is so much wonderful music in the world it makes sense to turn off what you don’t like and turn on to what makes you feel.

This is also the reason why comments are disabled on these posts. If you agree with me and want to express your love for a band, track or album then put it on the stereo and share the music with those around you. If you disagree with me then so be it but try to remember I’m talking about my opinion and not yours.

Full Disclosure

All of these stories are my own in the entirety, aside from the editing by my peers, and I have not been paid by anyone to write any aspect of any story, nor has anyone paid me to include or exclude a song, band or album. Throughout my stories when I link to an album, band or song I will always include what can be classified as free links. By this I mean the link will go to the bands site, Wikipedia and in the cases where the band has placed their music on YouTube then I will link to those tracks.