Like most humans today, my wife loves to make photo albums. In the past, she got creative in constructing the book and assembling the photos, but in the digital age, it’s just easier to compile them online and buy a printed book.
I don’t make photo albums, but I certainly benefit from her efforts. From time to time it’s great to crack open a photo album and revisit those images from years past, the careful arrangement of our frozen memories loosely suggesting the broad arc of our lives together.
Now, like most TNOCS-ers, I love to make music playlists. In the past, I would get creative with recording mix tapes for friends and constructing some cover art, but in the digital age, well…to be honest, I don’t currently have a good solution.
Mix CDs were only a slight downgrade from mix tapes (fine, go ahead and skip the shrieking balloon track that I selected just for you, see if I care.)
CD players have since been phased out of most new cars and computers. So I have moved onto Spotify playlists when I want to share music with someone. But given the limited and ever-changing availability of songs on streaming sites, this is a subpar option. It’s especially suboptimal when the music playlist I want to make and share is not just any playlist, but is in fact a “phono album.”
A phono album. You know, a music playlist curated to capture memories of the past. Like a photo album, of sound…
My Phono Album project has been something I’ve been doing since 2013. I make a playlist to represent every year of my life, specifically the music I was soaking up at the time. Music is such a powerful trigger for memories, so I regard the phono album as a worthy counterpart to the more conventional photo album.
I started the project with some clear rules, with the intention of breaking them should I feel like it (spoiler alert: I did).
• First, each song would need to be something I actually listened to at the time, be it recently released music, or older stuff.
• Second, an artist or band could only have one song per chapter, to optimize variety.
• Third, the selection and sequencing should be entertaining and engaging – though sad or dark moments are permitted.
• Fourth, each mix should have an overall personality that sets it apart from other chapters, optimizing novelty across chapters.
• Finally, each chapter would be exactly 80 minutes, enough to fill that trusty vessel of music that will never be phased out, the CD (cue audience laughter).
The 80-minute duration meant that the earliest I could go for the project was 8 years old. I have plenty of earlier musical memories, but not enough for a full mix—and anyway it’s hard to get precise with the years certain memories took place. So 2nd grade was the best that I could do. Bummer for those of you who want mixes of Disney soundtracks, novelty tunes, gospel hymns, and thrash metal from my older sister.
For my high school years, I encountered the opposite problem: too much great music!
So my first rule bending was to make 80-minute supplement mixes going forward. Since the first wave of mixes were prioritizing an overall personality per chapter (and whenever possible, some clever biographical nods via selected tracks), the supplement mixes feel more like a simple collection of songs. I’m happy to have both approaches included, as I feel like they both capture something unique and important about those times.
The first approach is like a photo album that gets super creative in its construction of a narrative timeline via an interesting visual collage, but excludes some beloved photos that just couldn’t be worked into the design. The second type is all of the leftover photos that you still love, but are just more random.
Of course, this whole project ran into a snag in 2016: I largely stopped consuming new music. I was primarily going deep into classics like The Kinks, and compositions by my favorite classical composers, and simply didn’t feel like reaching out for new stuff.
So, I scaled back to one mix per year, and even those were pretty hard to fill out. Also, my original mixes were centered on academic years, since most of my life was spent attending or working at a school, but I left academia for government research in 2016. Ultimately I opted to ditch the original design for the more sensible calendar year.
What about this issue of not listening to new music? Well, I didn’t know how to shake my funk and get back into it, but then I had an idea. I decided to change the rules of my phono album mixes one more time, in order to re-ignite my passion. Now I only include new music in each chapter, though I still look for stuff that kind of captures where I am in my life.
It’s a lot more artificial an approach to archiving than the mixes I had made about years past, but this recent process has steered me to some truly amazing new music that has indeed been embedded in my life and memories, so I’d say that’s a success. I even do two chapters per year again, though I’ve simply switched to 6-month installments rather than do a post hoc supplemental mix.
The only problem that remains is that I’d like to share my older mixes with friends, and as I mentioned earlier, streaming services such as Spotify have limited and ever-shifting access to songs. A fair amount of essential tracks in my mixes are not available, and every song available now has a risk of disappearing at some point.
So much time has gone into making these things, I don’t even want to think about them being subject to omissions and requiring ad hoc tweaking due to Spotify’s contractual situation.
If anyone has any suggested solutions to this issue of online sharing (maybe audio streams?), I’d be happy to hear them!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some compiling to do…
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Great post, Phylum.
I don’t think I have a solution to the issue of online sharing.
The issue you raised (and streaming in general) has prompted me to really consider how I go about listening to music.
Another website (which shall not be named) recently had a few articles about compiling a digital music collection:
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/everything-you-need-to-build-your-own-digital-music-collection/
[At this point, I must pause and rely on the Principal Skinner excuse. I was only at that website to get directions on how to get away from there].
Anyway, my point: I think playlists and compiling music have prompted us to really consider the “buffet” model that streaming offers us. The smorgsboard is so very tempting–and, yes, we stuff ourselves. But when the “meal” is done, so to speak, we feel empty. The food/eating metaphors in my comment are deliberate, especially as we have adopted the phrase “consume music” (which I loathe) since the advent of streaming.
Practically speaking, it seems that when we have everything, we have nothing. We can listen to it all (or what is presented as “all” the music available) but we lose the deep-level engagement that comes with those meaningful pursuits, such as curating a playlist to share with others.
I have started to compile playlists for my son, in attempt to have him listen to an array of genres and eras. Funny thing, besides our family dance-party playlist, he does not like listening to the playlists. He much rather prefers putting on vinyl records or CDs. Even though this becomes cumbersome, with switching records every song or two, he has developed his own playlist of sorts in that he follows a certain routine of putting one particular record on after another. Maybe Generation Alpha will show us the way?
p.s. my wife also loves compiling photo albums.
“Practically speaking, it seems that when we have everything, we have nothing.”
Words of wisdom. A great observation about 21st century digital life in general.
Thanks, mm7!
Re: unlimited consumption, my period of not getting into new music mentioned in the post was very much tied to this endless, mindless consumption of new things. I guess I wanted to take more of a bovine approach and ruminate on some beloved works for a while rather than the locust model we often follow. 🙂
Incidentally I also did it for books, and read nothing but A Song of Ice and Fire (outside of work, at least) for a few years. I’ve since embraced more consumption of books and music, but I agree that it always pays to be thoughtful and mindful about what we consume–or rather, how we engage with art.
I keep telling myself I’m going to sit down and listen to an album all the way through, but it just never happens. I used to do it all the time. The way I wore out hugely popular albums like Abbey Road or Who’s Next or Dark Side Of The Moon was the same way I wore out the lesser known Moving Waves by Focus, Mirror Star by The Fabulous Poodles, and Live At Carnegie Hall by Renaissance.
That’s just how things worked. You bought an album, took it home, and listened to it. I mean you sat down and didn’t do anything else but listen. And if you didn’t like it, you listened to it again the next day. It was a work of art and it deserved your attention, and there was usually something likable about it under the surface.
Streaming has made music disposable. You don’t own it anymore, you don’t have an investment. There’s no reason to sit and listen. On very rare occasions something will catch my ear and I’ll look up the artist and album, but so much of it just floats by unnoticed. It’s not good for the artist nor the listener.
I will often speak about this with younger people who have only known access to online streaming and MP3 files for their music experience.
It’s easy to have a, “Well, let me tell you… In my day…” POV. But I really do think that it was a better experience to have a record, tape, CD or whatever to hold in your hands. To look at the cover, read the liner notes, and put on the shelf as a collectable. You were somehow more invested.
I wonder if folks in their 30s and 40s go up to their attic and discover an old forgotten iPod, that somehow will accept a charge. Do they get to reminisce in the way I did with my old forgotten records?
I hope so. It really was great way to spend a rainy Saturday.
Pitchfork is an institution. I think it’s great that you cited them here at tnocs.com!
Sounds like a real labour of love compiling the playlists and a great way of making the music more meaningful to you.
I have a file on my phone where I make a note of any books, films, TV shows and music I hear about that I want to check out. Some of the music will be a specific album, sometimes an artist and other times its one song. Films and TV have been a great source of finding music, some old and some new. If I hear something while watching I’ll make a note at the end so I can go on tunefind at some point and find out what it was.
If its an album I’ve noted down to check out and it passes the listening test I’ll move that onto the filenote section for repeated listening. For the one off songs I usually have enough of them every month or two that I stick them in a playslist just titled with the month and year. Some of the playlists are an hour, some months I’ve had 3 hours worth. They generally end up as a mix of genres and era’s, I like the way that they sound like they haven’t been curated and are a random thrown together snapshot. I’ve been doing it for years and so far have had very little problem with songs disappearing from Spotify. I might just be lucky but its worked OK for me so far.
When I started streaming I did have that feeling of having access to everything but not knowing what to do with it and losing the connection to music. Even when I did find something new that I loved it would get lost amongst the volume of options. Since I started keeping track of those albums that I want to revisit I’ve felt like I’m back in control.
I won’t deny there’s issues with streaming in terms of the business model and how musicians are paid but on a personal level as a means of finding and listening to music it totally works for me.
Aside from my recent mixes featuring nothing but new music, I have three of my older phono album mixes up on Spotify. But beyond that, I start to run into this issue of missing tracks.
I noticed that they finally got Captain Beefheart on there, so that could help for a mix or two. But plenty of other gaps remain, and some more gaps opened up fairly recently (such as Neil Young).
I do appreciate streaming for many things, but specificity in compilation can be a real drawback. At least for me. Glad it works for you!
Still waiting for Spotify to acknowledge that the Thrashing Doves exist.
From about 1981-1992, I bought singles. When I sold them and uploaded most of my music to my external hard drive, I catalogued all of it, so I still have a record of it (if you were interested, external HDs are NOT indestructible).
From 1992-2000, I bought CDs – not the same as albums, but singles had gone the way of the Dodo, so it was the next best thing.
From 2000-2007, I downloaded using Napster/Pirate Bay and other methods, most of which I still have.
From 2007-2011, I kept a blog and tracked with music I was listening to regularly, and posted each month a Top 30/40/50 (depending on how much music I was invested in).
Then I met my wife.
The point is, I would LOVE to make Spotify playlists similar to yours, but I just. don’t. have. time.
A small regret, one I don’t think much about when my six-year old asks me to play board games with him, or my daughter and I read together. But man, if I had the time…
Yeah, no kids here, which does free things up quite a bit. Even when I was doing academic research, I at least had some time to myself to unwind. While my wife practiced piano, I would work on this stuff.
Then again, if you had the time, you’d still probably run into the same quandary that I have, this issue of patchy music availability for shared playlists. It was so much easier with tapes and CDs…
Interesting take on the album angle, Phylum.
I don’t believe I’ve used Spotify at all in setting up my “mix tapes” and my sons are baffled that I don’t use Pandora.
I’ve always responded that you’re stuck with what they think you want to hear and what you REALLY want to hear is not that music.
I’ve stumbles upon a system that I don’t know how I created but as an example, when I work out, I go to You Tube, pick a song and it gives a list to the side of comparable artists but not necessarily the same genre. After the song plays, I stop what I’m doing and pick another song (gasp, the mere thought of stopping what your doing and a picking another song brings back the neanderthal age when you actually changed the channel on your TV by hand!).
The next day I returned to the first song and found I had created a playlist that I could hear again. Then I found I could pick a particular song, play it and another list of comparable artists but not the exactly the same, play their songs and create a whole new mix tape!
That’s what I’ve set up in the library at school, so that each day could reflect the mood or the weather.
For example, a sunny day brings the Cowsills “The Flower Girl”, Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park”, “It’s a Beautiful Morning” etc.
Bad weather brings “Rainy Day in Georgia”, the Carpenters “Rainy Days and Mondays”, etc.
So far the students seem to enjoy it as they travel through to their classrooms. And the kicker is for most of the tapes, I don’t have to stop to play another song, it just comes up automatically.
I stopped buying new music from 2010-2013. I remember the last CD; it was Robyn’s “Body Talk: Volume Two”. I had seen her on Letterman the night before. I bought the volume without “Dancing on My Own”. In 2010, I was driving a Chevy Prism with a tape deck. Life got better in 2014. But then I joined a cult. I bought every album that Pitchfork gave an eight to during the interim I was living in a nineties-era indie rock bubble. When I left the cult, I bought all the albums I skipped because of what one website suggested I should be listening to. Matt Pond PA’s The Dark Leaves is not a 4.8.
I loved reading this, Phylum, because for a long time there, I kept photo albums and annual mix tapes or CDs for my hubby and me. Did a boxed set at year 15. Stopped after year 21 because he wasn’t as into the music as I was. This year is our 30th anniversary, though, so there may need to be an update.
Oh, and forgot to mention: I loved the headline.
Thanks!
I second the notion of an updated 30th Anniversary box. Even if he’s not as into the music, he probably heard you playing it, and he will be into the memories!
Phylum, this is a genius idea – a phono album. Especially for us folks where music has been our life’s road map.
I’m one of those weirdos that actually enjoys looking through other people’s photo albums; I would totally be immersed in reviewing anyone’s photo album. That would be such a hoot for me!!!
Thanks! Hopefully I can share some time. 🙂