Week 1 Of The Album A Day Project

So this project of mine has failed on both accounts. I haven't listened to an album every day and it hasn't prompted me to write more. The plus-side though is that I have been listening to a lot more music than the last couple of months and I have been listening to a lot more albums, rather than just tracks I like.

For the sake of pretence, I'm going to write about 7 albums at a time even if they weren't listened to in a calendar week.

It all started with Radiohead's "OK Computer". Its a little bit embarrassing to think that I didn't like Radiohead until about 3 or 4 years ago, but I'm now so well acquainted with this album that I found myself tuning out until I heard my favourite tracks.

A New Album Every Day

When I first started this blog, I didn't want to make it all about music because that is already such a big part of my life. But in the tour van the other day I decided that I needed to make more of an effort to listen to a wider range of music. I realised that there are a lot of classic albums that other people take for granted, but that I'd never properly listened to. Plus, there are hundreds of more recent albums that I've always meant to listen to, but never got round to doing.

So I've made a commitment to listen to at least one album in its entirety every day for the next year. No cherry-picking favourites or skipping ones that don't give me instant gratification.

Good and Evil

I was trawling Youtube the other day and came across a great video made by RSA Animate. Basically what they do is get a talk by an inspiring speaker and then illustrate the talk. Not only is it really cool just to watch the illustrations take place, it actually helps (me, at least ...... and probably the other however millions that have watched all their videos) remember what the speaker is talking about.

I'd come across one of their videos before, so I was pretty sure I'd like this one too:

Bowling Is Meant To Be Fun

On the weekend, Katy and I took our nephew out bowling. We were about halfway through the game when a boy (maybe 14yo) came up to our lane and picked up the bowling ball I had been using off our rack. At first I thought he was being silly, but when he turned to walk away with my bowling ball, I stopped him and said that I was still using it.

As he put it back down, I heard his mother (or who I assume was his mother) whisper angrily at him “Over there” and point at the wall behind us where all the spare bowling balls were.

I was a bit put off by the mother’s reaction, so I watched him as he picked his ball and went back to his lane and immediately start bowling. By himself. And I don’t just mean that he was the only one bowling (which is true as well), but it was as if his mother wasn’t even in the same room. The whole time she sat virtually unmoving except for her fingers on her mobile phone, either playing some inane game (that didn’t seem to bring any pleasure to her judging from her facial expression) or sending messages to people more important than her son standing in front of her.

Music

This is gonna be a really scattered post, but I can lay the blame on something other than me. My iPod. More specifically, the shuffle option on my iPod. It takes me from one end of the mood spectrum to the other with no warning or sense. And the best thing is that I’m loving every second of it.

I’ve come to realise that music means quite a lot to me. That is probably fairly obvious to anyone that knows me well, or simply knows that I’m in a band and has assumed it to be the case. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter if it is loud, trashy punk or the softly spoken beauty of folk music, if it is angry shouts or anguished cries or sweet nothings, I love it all. Although sometimes a song will bring me to tears (especially late at night), they are happy tears … except when I listen to the Eels sometimes.

But I just wanted to list some of the tracks that I have re-discovered since I started shuffling at the start of my shift at work today:

Beck - Mixed Bizness
The Hives - A Little More For Little You
David Bowie - Heroes
Cake - You Part The Waters
Gang Of Four - Natural’s Not In It
LCD Soundsystem - Someone Great

This isn’t meant to be an advertisement for the iPod, but I’m not sure what I would do without it. I certainly couldn’t show up to work day in day out without it, I know that.

You've got to fight for the one you love

I used to watch coverage of awards shows and always be amazed that some of the actors/musicians had been in long-term relationships, whereas most of them seemed to only be able to have fairly short ones. I actually felt that the celebrities that did stick and work on their relationships had more integrity. And in a way, I still think that.

Romantic relationships are a funny thing. Although there are plenty of arguments on how love changes and advances or whether there is only one “the one” for each of us, the fact remains that relationships go through difficult times. Even the best relationships go through difficult times. And if you’re in that difficult time in a relationship, you are faced with a simple decision - do you work on the problems and try and get out of that difficult time, or do you end the relationship. Simply (and evolutionarily) put: fight or flight.

Haiti

There is something extremely distressing about natural disasters, especially when they end the lives of large numbers of people. Although I haven’t been entirely tuned into everything about the earthquake in Haiti, it has really affected me. I cried when I watched one of the news reports mainly because of the pleading screams of people stuck in the rubble, desperate for help and escape.

The last catastrophe of this magnitude was the tsunami in 2004 that resulted in approximately 200,000 dying.

I don’t know if it is because Haiti is a lot further away from us than Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and all the other countries affected by that tsunami, but this tragedy in Haiti doesn’t seem to be entering into the public Australian conscience nearly as much. And I feel kind of guilty that I haven’t really paid all that much attention to it.

There are varying estimates of how many people have died in the earthquake (30,000 to 200,000), but they have reported that 3 million people have been directly affected by it. That is almost completely unfathomable. Its like if everyone that attended the grand finals of both the AFL and NRL died in one major event.

I’m not really writing this to make any deep points or extol anyone that happens to read it to donate money to the cause. I’m just upset about it and need to write something.