I’ve always had a lot of interest in music. Incapable of making
it myself, I have a deep respect and love for those who can.
My favorite artists are generally complex,
trending dark. The best songs explore subtle depths with lyrics that provide
plenty of food for thought. Songs don’t have to go all over the place.
Contrapuntal harmonies don’t have to be at loggerheads throughout and singers
don’t need to command seven octaves when what they can do with two or three
just blows you out of the water.
Of course not everything I listen to needs to be so terrifically
complex and arch and subtle. Sometimes I just listen to stuff because I enjoy
it and it makes me happy. But most
of my
favorite artists and music got that way because of emotionally satisfying chord
progressions and powerful poetry.
One of the coolest things about being alive right now is that if
you hear it and love it,
you can
generally own it. Along with a number of iTunes purchases, my collection has
been growing since high school. My 45s and vinyl LPs and my earliest mixes
taped off the radio gave way to cassettes, cassette singles and eventually CDs.
I’ve been buying mp3s almost exclusively for years now. My latest project is to
reassess my top-rated selections. I’ve discovered there are many songs that I’ve
rated five stars because I don’t not like them –
that if
they turned up on the radio I wouldn’t necessarily change the channel. In that
that isn’t really the definition of a five-star song, I’m in the process of
whittling. It’s not an unpleasant process.
Along with some 3,500 songs I brought in from my cassette and CD
collections and mp3s I’ve pulled in from iTunes, I listen to a number of
podcasts over the course of any given week, mostly while out walking. My
favorites include Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, News From Lake Wobegon, This
American Life, WCBU’s “Out and About” arts feature with Nathan Irwin, Sound
Opinions and the NPR Sunday Puzzle. And naturally I’m quite fond of my own TV is the
New Reading podcast. There are all sorts of quality podcasts out
there, and they help make the walk just fly on by.
A note about my players: I started out with a tjPod which held
everything except its own when it loosed its carrier one spring and found a
puddle. The little silver tjShuffle which followed was charming, but limited. I
kept a manual rotation of music running through that thing, which can only
really hold like 1GB at a time. Now that I’ve replaced that with my tjNano, the
tjShuffle is wonderful for holding the podcasts I take along for walking. My
tjNano, conversely, is perfect for trucking along my top-rated songs with me at
all times.
This section lists my entire tjNano collection, more or less,
split A-M and N-Z by artist as listed in iTunes, along with my top-rated
selections and my most recent entries. Enjoy!
Main Page Catalogue
A-M Catalogue
N-Z Top
Rated Newest