Listening To Albums Again

 by whiteray

Sometime way back (likely about ten years ago, but I’m not going to go dig), I wrote elsewhere that one of the benefits of the digital age was getting away from the album format and being able to structure a playlist of separate tracks. 

Back in the LP days, if there were a horrendous track right in the middle of Side One of a generally great album (friends of mine in those days might have nominated “Octopus’ Garden” on the Beatles’ Abbey Road), one had to either endure the track or go to the turntable and actually lift the tone arm to set it down at the start of the next track. 

As I explored that idea back then, I wrote something (maybe) about being freed from vinyl tyranny. 

But about eighteen months ago, as I puttered on my computer in my corner of our downstairs room. I thought, “Y’know, it might be nice to listen to Abbey Road all in order.” (Or it might have been Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks or maybe the Moody Blues’ A Question Of Balance.) I had two ways to do that. There’s a large CD player on the other side of my desk, but I’d have to pull the CD from its spot in the stacks and walk around the desk and the piano keyboard. 

Or I could have the search function in the RealPlayer find the tracks that made up the album and place them in running order and then listen. 

And then I wondered: Does my new CD ripper allows me to rip an entire CD into one mp3? For years, I’d used a freeware program that allowed me to do that. I’d not done entire albums but I’d done large mp3s of suites, like the medleys on Side Two of (again) Abbey Road. And maybe five years ago, when I got a new computer, that freeware program and Windows 10 didn’t like each other. So for a few years, I used RealPlayer to rip mp3s, and as much as I like most of what that program does, its ripping function is clunky and slow. 

But about two years ago – six months before this inner conversation took place – I’d invested in a new suite of mp3 management tools, including an mp3 ripper. I’d not dug into its features very much, as I was still trying to catch up on the single files lost when an external hard drive crashed. Maybe the new software had a function to rip whole CDs as one mp3. 

Well, as readers might expect (or there would be no point to telling the story), it does, and at odd times over the last year-and-a-half, I’ve been doing just that.

There are currently 274 tracks tagged “Full Album” on the digital shelves. The selection is heavy with the Moody Blues, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in their various combinations. None of that is a surprise, I’m certain. 

What I find more interesting are some of the other artists whose works have come to mind and wound up in the “Full Albums” section: Three 1990s albums each by the Sundays and Counting Crows; two by Brewer & Shipley from 1969 and 1970; Jim Croce’s three major label releases from the early 1970s; three by Dan Fogelberg from the 1970s (one of those with flautist Tim Weisberg); two from the 1970s British folkie Shelagh McDonald; Dusty Springfield’s Dusty In Memphis; Steve Winwood’s Arc Of A Diver; four albums from the Eighties onward by Dion; Nick Drake’s three sad folk albums from the 1970s; some Fairport Convention; David Gray’s 2000 album Babylon; a lot of Nanci Griffith (a result of her death just a couple of months ago); and several albums from the Tedeschi Trucks Band, just to skim off a few. 

I let the albums play on random as I read news or putter or play tabletop baseball. I don’t always listen purposefully, but I hear the music roll by (just like it used to in the rec room back home during high school and college), and I’m learning some things: I don’t really like Roxy Music’s Avalon beyond “More Than This” and the title track. The Fogelbergs wear thin after a few listens. August And Everything After by Counting Crows is a far better album than I recall. So, too, is The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby & The Range. And Steely Dan’s Aja remains a sonic masterpiece. 

It’s a long-range project, adding three or four a week. Where will it end? I dunno. Right now, I still have more than two terabytes free on the external hard drive. Will I get rid of the CDs and LPs if I get them all ripped as albums? Hell, no. 

Here’s an album from 1989 I posted at YouTube almost five years ago that was one of the first to be added to the full albums files: Evidence by Boo Hewerdine and Darden Smith, one of my favorite obscurities.