Having moved around as much as I have, at some point I thought to myself, “Why am I lugging around all these CDs when I can harness the power of technology!” I don’t remember how long it took, but I digitized my entire library of CDs, and a large library it was. Years of working in a music store and having friends with radio shows had left me with more plastic discs than an AOL warehouse, and through hours and hours of effort, they all worked their way into digital format.
The only downside to that, however, was that I was left with a massive, creaking, unwieldy iTunes library. There were playlists I’d open where a balrog would appear to block my path, it was that bad, that deep, that complex. Out of necessity I’d become a huge fan of ‘smart playlists’, since they gave me the best chance at keeping in touch with my music — what I heard, what I liked, what I hated, etc. I was feeling pretty good about things.
But music, like water, never stops flowing, and the iTunes library continued to grow. I forget what it was exactly, a beam of light through a church window, seeing a baby laugh for the first time, maybe a ‘Hoarders’ marathon on A&E, I don’t know. But something inside me said, “Do not add any more music to this hungry, hungry hippo until you have heard every single song already awaiting you.”
So that’s what I did. I decided that my “Unheard Songs” playlist was going down. I would listen to, and perhaps rate, every single song hiding in there, unheard, in the shadows. And I mean come on… have you listened to music lately? There’s a lot of crap out there. There’s a lot of crap everywhere, so what are the chances every single song I had was a wonderous gem? I soon realized that there were some stowaways hiding in there, taking up precious hard drive space. And so my journey began.
There were a lot of songs I forgot I had, a lot of great things, like Leadbelly’s album of children’s songs, or a cover of “Love Hurts” by the The Phi Mu Washboard Band, a Georgia State University sorority band from the 60′s. Or those old karaoke recordings from Japan, featuring my friends and I masterfully performing your favorite hits of the 80′s and 90′s? But there were also… other things. Random terrible techno remixes of already terrible songs, minimalist experimental tracks featuring nails on chalkboard and metal clanging, or the Pogues’ “Metropolis”…. I have no idea what they were thinking there.
So songs have been coming, songs have been going. Great songs get 4 stars, OK songs get 3 stars, songs that may be useful get 2, and anything that’s a waste of hard drive space gets 1 star, to be deleted when the playlist is empty.
This has been going on for a while now, though I forget exactly how long. Today, though, I checked the count, and it tells me I have approximately 31 days left until I finish. That’s just about one month, and since our fine month of May is coming to a close, I have decided to share one track, every day, with you. The best track of the day. I cannot express how completely random of a selection it is, so I’m very curious to see how that nets out as my project comes to a close. And you, fine friend, reap the rewards!
Check back tomorrow for the first of 31 tracks, curated from the mysterious shadows of my iTunes library. It’s kind of like sticking your hand into a magical bag of music, where you’ve got a 50-50 chance of pulling Communist anthems from Russia, or Alabama folk songs, or a Hello Kitty Christmas track, or Frank Sinatra, or Sleater Kinney, or… wait, is that still 50-50?
