The Gist.

I hate my music.

Don't worry, it's nothing too serious, it happens from time to time. It's just that, like any relationship, sometimes my relationship with my record collection (a relationship I'm sure you all care very much about) gets a bit stale, unrewarding, boring even. I've got the ol' 10gig iPod, and cycling through the artists or albums recently, it just seems that nothing turns me on. Seeing how I'm not going to have vast sums of expendable income to spend on new records anytime soon, and that I'm committed to the majority of my music for basically the rest of my life, I think the time has come to spice things up.

So I've resolved to listen to all of my music (well, ok, not all--let's call it my favorite 10gigs--if I had the 40gig iPod this would be really interesting), in alphabetical order (by song name) over the next year. Listening to music in alphabetical order is actually quite unintuitive-it's pretty amazing how rigidly we conceptualize music into an artist/album/song organization (this is something that the iPod's OS taps into quite well). It is my hope that by listening to this music in a new context (that is, a new order) will help make it fresh again.

At the moment, I have 2,320 songs on my expensive white toy. The plan is to listen to 7 songs a day (7X365=2555...this gives me some room for error and, er, laziness), and write about them every day. Stay tuned.

Soon, the great project begins!