The Rolling Stones - Emotional Rescue

The challenge of listening to older music, especially music released before we were born (this one beats me by two years), is that we have a natural tendency to filter it through the prism of "now." We know all that's come afterwards, and we know how the group has weathered the passing of time.

In fact, we often know this supplementary information before we know any of the music. Here I am listening to the Rolling Stones' 1980 album Emotional Rescue, and despite my best efforts I can't help but listen to the Stones through the prism of the silly old men they have become.

This already isn't the way I expected to start

It's Saturday, and I was hoping not to have to work today, but the girlfriend was a bit greedy for some me time yesterday, and I was happy to oblige her. But here I am on a Saturday, enjoying the weather from out the window and watching ninja squirrels raid bird feeders.

So here goes though, time to start word dumping on whatever I happen to be listening to.

Incubus - If Not Know, When?

Not especially pleased to start the inaugural post with an album that I'm not especially pleased with, but hey.

Incubus to me is proof positive of how long a band can endure if they anchor themselves to a couple memories. How can I listen to this band without thinking of high school and my first visit to my future college, where the last thing I remember is talking about how important "The Warmth" was to my burgeoning music life before coming to face-first in a toilet a few hours later.

The band is bound to this moment in my life, and I've casually followed them since, never being particularly excited about them, but never particularly disliking them either.

Hello.

Time to start an experiment. I'm going to talk about music here. That in and of itself is not new or novel in any way, but it's a change from the more scattershot blogging I have been doing.

I don't have too many definite rules for this space, other than the fact that every post will have something to do with music. The idea for the site came during a particularly busy work week. I work from home, and during that time I listen to a lot of records.

I've always played little listening games with my collection—listening in alphabetical order, chronological order, etc.—and I began a particularly fun listening regimen about a month or so ago.

I get excited about this stuff while I'm listening to it, and too many errant thoughts are going to waste in my head. I imagine this space will become a place for reviews, narratives, commentary, and shameless self promotion.

I'm thinking I might live blog during my work day. Posting comments about the records I'm listening to as they strike me, kinda like what I did when I listened to Weezer's whole catalog a few months ago. I dunno. We'll see.

My taste in music is kinda strange, a really quirky subset of mainstream rock and awful nonsense. You just wait and see.