Addicted To Vinyl Musical thoughts from the open road, with headphones on

Death by shuffle mode

This past week I read an interesting article about "the death of the album." It gave me pause and I suddenly realized that lately, to me, yeah the album has been pretty dead.

I used to have quite a voracious appetite for new music. Even when I was younger I can remember trips into New York City where my friends and I would hit the shops down in St. Mark's Place, which was nothing more than a dumping ground for music company employees to rid themselves of all those promos they had sitting around their offices. A $20 bill would net you 15-20 vinyl albums on any given trip and somehow I always seemed to find the time to listen to it all. Not only would most of them find their way to TDK C-90 cassettes to listen to in the car (always seems like THE place to test out new tunes), but I would also cherry pick the best tunes for a constant revolving mix tape. It's funny how even now I remember a lot of these songs, no matter how obscure they are today. Bands like i-Ten, Aviator and Far Corporation were household names to me.

As the years progressed, CD's moved in and, while I may not have been purchasing as much music as I had been, the procedure was still the same, with cassettes eventually being replaced by spindles of blank CD's.

Then came the MP3 and suddenly things really changed for me. With Napster and Kazaa, it seemed any song was in grasp and it was probably at this point I stopped listening to albums in full most of the time. It was like I reverted to my 70's youth and became all about the single again. I would make mix CDs or just listen at random off the computer. And when the iPod came into my life, it's probably where the album began it's death spiral for me personally.

I went from listening to albums in full, whether I was in the car or work, to just hitting SHUFFLE and letting fate choose my ever evolving and quite random playlist. The iPod also made it a lot easier to make quick and dirty mixes and live inside of those rather than just plowing through new albums and listening to them they way they were meant to. I turned my weekly "new stuff" mix tape/CD into a playlist that became my primary listen, yet I have close to 200 albums on the device where 75% of the songs are now an afterthought. It seems like an almost unlimited capacity for storage has dictated my listening habits where as a smaller way of thinking used to force me to sit, take in and ultimately enjoy the ride.

It's a shame too because when I think back, a lot of times my favorite songs were album tracks that may never have received any sort of air play. Whether it's "Without Love" from Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" or the title track from Journey's "Escape," I realized that I'm probably missing out on a lot of great music lately. Hell, I even have a few albums I bought this year on iTunes that I have yet to listen to a single track. $30 well spent I'd say.

Oddly enough, it's three new releases that may be swinging me back in the other direction. The new ones from Brad Paisley and Rob Thomas have already gotten more album play than normal from me and I anticipate the same from Daughtry's impending release. With those I may be able to break my Slacker addiction, even if for just enough to find all that deeper music that I know is out there, just awaiting discovery.

So with that, I say goodbye to Shuffle...or at least until I can start to appreciate the journey as much as the destination.