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| Thursday, March 28, 2013 10:12 PM |
| Bath Albums |
 by Fëanor |
When I was younger, I feel like my default unit of music was the album. My brother's, too. When we heard a song we liked, we didn't buy the single. (Well, maybe once or twice we bought some cassingles. Remember those??) We went out and bought the whole album. If we liked the album, we went back and bought all the other albums that band had made. Or, as many as we could find at the record store. Remember when you had to just keep going back to every record store you knew of to find albums you wanted? And if those stores didn't have those albums, you were just out of luck? Crazy.
Anyway, not long after I embraced MP3s and moved my entire music collection onto my iPod, my default unit of music changed to the song. I stopped listening to whole albums and I started listening to playlists on shuffle. It was kind of a seismic shift. It felt freeing. I love the weird juxtapositions a random shuffle can create. And there's no commitment or continuity in a random shuffle; you can break off and start again whenever or wherever.
But for whatever reason, I'm starting to embrace the album again. I'm buying albums of music, and I'm listening to whole albums with my son, instead of playlists on shuffle. And I'm seeing again what you can do with an album, how it can be a deeply meaningful grouping, how putting a bunch of songs together like that can give them more power and meaning than when they're just ripped out and played alone, out of context.
All of which is to say, I'm playing albums when I give my son a bath at night, and here are some of the classics I'm revisiting and new stuff I'm discovering:
- Abacab - Genesis
- Abbey Road - The Beatles
- Achtung Baby - U2
- Act II: The Father of Death - The Protomen
- The Suburbs - Arcade Fire
- Band on the Run - The Wings
- Beaster - Sugar
- Genesis - Genesis
- Sheer Heart Attack - Queen
- So - Peter Gabriel
- Specter at the Feast - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
- Strange Cousins From The West - Clutch
- Jesus Christ Superstar - Andrew Lloyd Weber
- The Protomen - The Protomen
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