faqs

I think of the blog as the last 10%. In most projects, 90% of the work that goes in doesn’t return anything presentable. It all goes into foundations and brainstorming and prototyping and countless other things that take real time and attention, but that on their own would never be recognized, or even really recognizable. I listened to music and kept record of it, doing the meat of what I call “the project”, for a long time before I consolidated it into this blog. The blog is that last 10%, the 10% that turns something into a product, the 10% that turns something from being real to me into being real, period. The blog is a lot of work, but it’s also not, you know? It’s the icing on the cake that gives me something tangible to show for all the work that I already do.

The initial reason I started the project, the reason I started listening to new artists thoroughly, album by album, was because I wanted to know what I liked. I liked listening to music— most everyone does, I think. Everyone likes listening to music, so it’s one of those things that everyone will inevitably ask about. “What kind of music do you like?” Not knowing how to respond to that sucks. It was so painful for me, for somebody who considered themself a musician and a lover of music, to warily offer back, “…my family really likes The Killers?” and not really be able to say anything more than that because I didn’t know anything more than that.

I wanted to know more than that. I wanted to know what I liked. This is how I decided to do it. Anything less and I wouldn’t have been comfortable with what I knew. I’ve always been wary of claiming authority, of claiming knowledge as my own. Unless I can back it up, and back it up to such a degree that there can’t be even the shadow of a doubt that I am in control of what I said, I don’t want to say it. This, what I call “the project”, was a way for me to methodically ensure that I knew everything that I knew, if that makes sense.

I didn’t originally have such strict rules for myself, either. For the first month or so I listened to however many albums I could fit into a day, whether that was a half a dozen or zero. As I did it I became more aware of what I liked about it and what I didn’t, what was useful and what wasn’t, and it evolved to become the strict one album a day twice through it is now.

And not only did my exact methods shift to fit my purpose— as time’s gone on, my purpose has shifted as well. I started the project to learn what I liked. Now I continue the project to learn how to like, to let music change me into someone who is capable of receiving it well, for a constantly shifting understanding of what “receiving it well” means. For more info on that change of purpose, see On Ever-Changing Tastes and Preferences.

No. Genuinely, there isn’t. I try my hardest not to be results-oriented, in general. If I stop too long to think about why I’m doing something or what I’m hoping to accomplish by the time something is through, I tend to get existential and quit. I’ve learned that the best way for me to motivate myself is through understanding that I’m doing the thing for its own sake, that any positive outcomes are happy little accidents.

The closest thing I have to an “end goal” for this blog is the desire for it to be a useful and interesting record of my music listening and the effects it has had on me. At current pace, I’ll probably have listened to between 3500 and 4500 artists by the time I die. I guess that means my ultimate goal is to make it to 4269, since 42069 is so thoroughly out of reach. Damn.

“I sort through everything and find the artist’s first released studio album. If instead they started out with a shorter EP, I’ll try to find another EP or a couple of singles to combine together and count that as a kind of psuedo-sorta-esque-ish album for the first day. Then I listen to one album, all the way through, twice, every day until the artist is done.” Taken from a longer explanation at the top of the list.

To reiterate: a “listen” is when I listen to the entire discography of an artist. One album a day, twice through, every day until the artist is done. I also listen to all of the singles and EPs, it’s just a little messier to decide how much to listen to each day— I usually aim for an album’s worth of music per day. So yes, I listen to the literal entire discography of the artist. After which I give a ranking, then write up a (usually) short explanation and add it to the blog.

“I made it a rule for myself that I could only make any edits and adjustments if I first relistened through the entire discography of the artist again. My rankings have to be based off of listening, not hazily incomplete memory. I do my relistens most days, but not every day, and not the same amount every time I do it. Most days, though, it’s pretty much the same. After my main listening, I listen to the next two albums of the current artist on my relisten list (only once through each, as opposed to my usual two).

So when I talk about relistening to an artist, when I say that something is a RELISTEN, I’m talking about an additional listen of somebody’s entire discography in order, with the specific intention of reevaluating how I feel about them. This doesn’t include all the times I’ve continued to listen through artists purely for enjoyments sake, or when I did full additional listens of artists without specifically taking note of it and turning it into a “relisten”— a relisten is a specific event with specific premeditated intent (otherwise I’d be trying to track waaaayyyyy more than I can handle).”

The above is taken from the post Formalizing RELISTENS (aka Formalizing EDITS take two).

Also worth noting— when I do a relisten, I make a little post that notifies and timestamps the relisten, but the actual details of the relisten are edited into the original post I made for the artist. Every RELISTEN post has a link to the artists main page where I put my impressions of the relisten and why it adjusted my opinion of the artist the way it did.

Honestly, it’s mostly just vibes and intuition. I’ll get the feeling that something has changed, that something has changed in me. Like I’m ready to receive the music in a way I wasn’t before. Sometimes I’ll just get the nagging feeling that something is off and I need to reclarify things. Sometimes that means a more positive opinion; sometimes it doesn’t.

I keep a list on my phone (so surprising, I know. I keep a lot of lists, okay?) of all the artists I need to relisten to. I have an ordered queue, and then the rest are in a general pool that’s organized into a couple different categories. There are artists I expect to raise in rank, artists I expect to fall, and artists for whom I’ve no idea. I even have a category for artists I know I’ll need to need to relisten to later, after further exposure to them and other artists like them.

At time of writing, my relisten list (extremely abbreviated) looks something like this:

Queue:

• Carl Barat (includes Carl Barat and the Jackals)
• Maggie Rogers (not sure)
• Vampire Weekend (mayyybe to S-)

Expect to fall:

• Quinn XCII (don’t actually think it’ll change, I just never did a real, full relisten when I moved them down before and I’d like to do that)
• KNOWER (probably just lower in the As, but maybe as low as high A-)

Expect to raise:

• Lizzy McAlpine (to higher A (low A+ isn’t out of the question))
• Louis Cole (higher up in As, it should at least swap places with KNOWER, I think I got this pair wrong)

No idea:

• Colbie Caillat
• Jonathon Coulton

I know I for sure am gonna need to revisit but I think I need more exposure first:

• The Last Shadow Puppets (to B+ (the thing with this is that I just don’t know them enough to care about them, for them to actually have an identity in my mind, and I don’t think that’s what an A- is, that doesn’t make sense. I’m happy for these guys to make their way back up once they occupy a space more strongly in my mind, but until then a B+ is more accurate to what they are, I think))
• Radiohead (I think they might be growing on me)

Hopefully that gives a good idea of how my relistening works, what that process looks like.

Like a normal person, hmm… no, not really! After I finish my required listening for the day (and my less required relisten), things get more normal, but listening to music like a normal person is kinda a tall order for me.

There are lots of common ways people listen to music nowadays. Some people are playlist-people. Some people listen to the same song on repeat for days at a time. Some people listen to nothing but Taylor Swift. Outside of my daily album, I’m a put-everything-into-one-big-playlist type of guy. I’ve got playlists that I use to organize music, but I don’t use them, I don’t really listen to them. They’re just there. I always just end up using my one-big-playlist.

The issue is, that main playlist is at 5000 tracks and counting, literally half a month long. I can’t shuffle it, because inevitably, by sheer chance, some songs would get played half a dozen times and some would be entirely forgotten. That’s unacceptable, because my understanding of an artist is absolutely not finished by the time I give them a ranking. That’s a starting point, that’s a mark to prove that I’ve put in the first minimum effort to having some opinion. To develop that opinion and make it truly worthwhile, I need to keep listening, I need to learn how to listen to that artist. That’s something that can only be accomplished with time and repetition.

So what I do is this: I make a smart playlist on Apple Music that auto-updates itself with the 10% least recently played songs in my main playlist, and I shuffle that. When I listen to a song, it automatically removes itself from the playlist and the next least recently listened to song takes its place. This way I still get to shuffle my music (I’d hate to just listen straight through), and I guarantee that I get through my whole playlist eventually, even across shuffles. By the time I’ve listened to the length of the playlist, I can guarantee that no more than 10% of the songs in the playlist were skipped that cycle. The odds of a song being skipped two cycles in a row is only 1%; three cycles 0.1%, and so on and so forth. I get to shuffle my huge-ass playlist without having to deal with songs that have been shuffled in 4 days in a row, without having to worry about there being songs I haven’t heard in months. Everything gets its turn. I know that whatever music I put in, I’ll listen to again and I’ll get further exposure to. Honestly, that’s a solid 80% of the reason I’m attached to Apple Music. I know of no other way to fulfill a similar function with any other music streaming service, despite a hefty chunk of time spent searching. The whole smart playlist setup is admittedly somewhat cumbersome; if anyone has better suggestions let me know.

I’d be remiss not to note the nature of my main playlist. It is not just songs I like. It is not curated to be what I think is my most pleasurable listening experience. There’s a lot of that, sure, but the primary factor of whether I add a song isn’t if I like it or not. Rather, the primary factor is if I want to hear the song again or not. Whether or not I want to hear it again— and this should come as no surprise if you’ve payed any attention to anything I’ve said on this blog— is not solely determined by how much I like the song. If the song made me think, if the song made me curious, if the song seems like a representative sample of an artist I don’t really like but who I also probably don’t really know how to listen to yet, I add the song. Yes, obviously I add songs I like, I want to listen to those again. In addition to that, I add songs I didn’t like, but that stuck out to me in some way.

Frankly, sometimes it doesn’t even take that much. I try to add at least a song or two from each album I listen to, even if nothing at all about them caught my attention at all, so that I will continue to be exposed to the sound and the artist, to learn how to listen. If I want to delete the song from my playlist later, I absolutely can and will. But, the burden of proof is on me. I have to have some degree of certainty that I do in fact understand that I don’t like the song and won’t be liking the song anytime soon, or that I specifically dislike the song.

Even then, there are some songs I keep on my playlist that I do not like, that I’ve listened to many times. I know I do not like them. I predict I probably will not ever come to like them. But they remain for me to suffer through, because I’m not capable of certainty, because nobody is, because any accurate certainty is a myth. It is possible that one day I’ll listen to a song by The Smiths and find that somewhere along the line I changed such that I enjoy it unreservedly. I have to be ready for that, I have to be able to apply the change that will inevitably come over me as I barrage myself with new sounds and ideas over and over again.

And sometimes, occasionally, I just listen to whatever I feel like. I’ll get a hankering for a particular album. I’ll get a song stuck in my head and put it on loop a couple times. When the mood strikes, y’know?

This is a fair question. My to-do list is not, from an outside perspective, anything that could realistically be called intuitive. It’s got big, obvious artists you’d expect to find in such a list, but it’s also got glaring absences. There are thousands of artists more famous and more recognized as influential than 80% the artists I’ve decided to put on my to-do list. This is because there is effectively infinite music in the world. I talk a lot about that in great depth in my essay On the Reduction of Infinite Music, which has been sitting at like 90% done for months. I’ll finish it soon and link it here when I do.

The point of it is really just that all music is listened to at the expense of an infinite amount of other music. If I choose to listen exclusively to famous, popular, or “influential” music, I’m not really exploring music. I’m exploring famousness, popularity, and influence. If I choose to listen exclusively to obscure, niche, underground music, I lose out on a lot of genuinely valuable experiences that come from better known stuff. My compromise is to listen to stuff that has, in some way or another, made itself known to me personally. I don’t need to seek out “Top 100 Artists of All Time” lists to pad out my list because I know that different music and different artists will come into my life on their own, will become known to me organically.

This means following up on recommendations from people I know, songs I’ve heard that I liked, and bands and artists who are somehow related to other bands and artists I have some connection to. It means being on the lookout for stuff to come to me. It means being on the lookout for the music that’s already in or near my life.

In addition to that, I like to conduct my own informal little genre investigations. Sometimes that means asking friends that I know like the genre what they’d recommend; sometimes it means crawling through reddit to see what keeps popping up; sometimes it means grabbing a chunk of relevant names from Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com).

In summary: I take lots of specific artist recommendations, I investigate the artists of songs I like, I investigate bandmates and producers and other like connections, and I try to give myself some understanding of most genres (though of course that’s obviously a huge and completely Sisyphean task).

Of those methods, I give top priority to recommendations. I try to ask everybody I know who cares even a little bit about music what their number one artist recommendation is. I say, “You can recommend one artist. It doesn’t matter who. It doesn’t matter if I hate them or if they have a million albums, I will listen to them in their entirety, with as open a mind as I know how to have.” So if you want to be a part of my list, shoot me a rec.

This one is both incredibly straightforward and somewhat hard to answer because in a lot of ways my answer is ultimately circular. The focus on albums is because I like albums. A lot of the reason I like albums is because of my focus on them.

That said, there are particular things about albums I like. They give an artist the opportunity to show off their skills as an artist, to prove they’re able to create an entire intentional work and not just a beat. For some more information on why I like albums, see my essay On Charisma.

The reason there are no ranked artists without full albums is because the album is the unit of music I use to organize my daily listening; I listen to one new album a day, every day. It felt appropriate when I started. It mostly still feels appropriate now, though my operative definition of what constitutes an album has started to loosen. Originally, I said that an album was an LP. But, it’s increasingly difficult to stay attached to a format that is ultimately arbitrary in origin and claim that I like it for its artistic merit. The real reason I liked it as an organizational unit is because it was convenient, but as my perception of what the smallest format of music can be while still fulfilling my requirement of “demonstrating the ability to create an entire intentional work and not just a beat” expands, I find myself needing to adjust my definition of “album”. Whatever I land on will still be a somewhat arbitrary parameter to help me use the album as an organizational unit, but it will be arbitrated by me instead of by the archaic technological constraints of a record.

Right now, an LP is certainly an album. EPs are touch and go. Remix albums don’t count. Cover albums don’t count. Multipart albums are touch and go, though typically each volume is an album. Cast recordings and soundtracks are touch and go, because they’re rarely the product of any one clearly discernible “artist”. I’m not really equipped to evaluate them within the structure of this project. Instrumental music in general is very touch and go. Contemporary stuff is sometimes organized in such a way that it fits well into the structure of this project, but only sometimes. I’m definitely not equipped to evaluate classical music within the structure of this project.

It can be any number of things. My essays are, in essence, investigations of ideas, thoughts, and questions I have that I can apply to music and to music listening. The real question here is basically, “What prompts me to have ideas, thoughts, and questions?”— all of which are very normal and usual things for people to have. What prompts you to have ideas, thoughts, and questions? There’s rarely a secret method.

I’ll have a conversation with somebody that sparks a thought. I’ll be writing one essay when something in it gives me the idea for another. I’ll read something interesting that makes me think. I’ll be writing a long commentary on an artist and realize there’s a broader idea at play I could talk more about. I’ll hear the same comment or question or complaint from people over and over until I just want to have a thorough written response I can point them toward, or at least that I can refer back to keep myself consistent in my answer. I’ll be in the shower or the car or eating cereal or whatever and I’ll just think of something. It’s really not that deep.

The most consistent, most specific way I’ll track down an idea is by realizing that there’s a word or idea that I already use in a very specific way that I need to define explicitly. Sometimes that’s easy, and all I have to do is write up a paragraph or two where I say, “When I say x, what I mean is blah blah blah blah blah.” Sometimes I start writing that pair of paragraphs and I realize that the particular definition I have in mind includes some particular assumption or set of assumptions. I have to examine the assumptions, decide if I think they make sense, and adjust them appropriately. Then I have to make them explicit and explain why they make sense, what purpose they serve, and how they interact with the specific way I’ve been using the original word or idea.

So yeah. If I have an idea, as people are wont to do, and I think it’s interesting, I might write about it and why I think it’s interesting. If I realize that I’ve been using a word or idea in a specific way, that I’ve been operating under implied assumptions, I have to write about it to make those assumptions clearly visible and fully functional.

It varies, and by a lot. Sometimes I plug something out and am happy enough with it to post it immediately, within a day or two of starting. Sometimes as I write I realize that there’s actually a lot of work to do to make my idea coherent, to actually understand the structure that I’m trying to construct. In those cases, it can take a long time, because I rarely work on something for more than 30 minutes at a time. That just isn’t long enough to get my brain into the right space, especially for longer essays— I get to the point that I have to take 15 minutes to reread what I’ve written just to know what I’m even talking about. Sometimes I have to let an essay be and come back to it months later. I have drafts that are nothing more than a title that I made to bookmark an idea, drafts I haven’t touched in months or longer. I have drafts with thousands of words that I haven’t touched in months or longer. I have drafts with thousands of words that I’ve been fiddling with, here a little there a little, for months, that need me to just get off my ass and grind it out to the finish line already. 

This FAQ page isn’t exactly an essay, but it probably makes for a fair comparison. At time of writing, it’s basically a dozen or so mini essays totaling 5k words. I didn’t work on it every day while I was working on it, but I was decently consistent and I’d say I made pretty good time on it. I first started it April 23, 2024. I finished and published it May 4th, a week and a half later.

But yeah, it depends. I think that’s a decent reference for what I’d call a pretty typical, ideal, unhurried pace for me, but I also don’t know how often I’m making stuff at a typical, ideal, unhurried pace.

Yes, I absolutely do. This can be for a number of reasons. Sometimes they’re not quite finished. Sometimes I hit a roadblock where I don’t actually understand what I need to understand yet, or because I need to investigate some genre or develop more confidence in my knowledge of some artist before I feel comfortable saying anything about it.

Sometimes I write the essay and pretty much finish it, but I just don’t feel certain about it. That uncertainty can be because I think it’s getting too close to an actual review, too far from what I have authority to say. That uncertainty can be because I feel I would need to write one or more essays that explain prerequisite knowledge before I can publish what I have, so I have to put it on the backburner until I can write those prerequisite essays. That uncertainty can be because I feel scope creep, not from my own personal authority, but from the limitations and themes I’ve carved out, implicitly or explicitly, for the blog.

At time of writing I’ve got north of 20k words that are written and unposted, that have been that way for longer than a year, that it’s entirely possible I never post.

Well, it sounds like you’ve got me figured out. It’s for the principle of it!

But really, there are lots of good reasons I believe in the principle. Insight into the answer of this question can be found all over this blog. I’d look at the answer to the “do you ever listen to music like a normal person” question listed above. I’d read my post, On Ever-Changing Tastes and Preferences. I’d read my post, On the Reduction of Infinite Music (into Musical Canons). I’ve got a couple drafts of essays that touch on this that I haven’t published yet. When I finish and post those, I’ll start up some new ones that will probably also touch on this.

Because really, this question touches on an incredibly important assumption that I make in this blog. This assumption is implicit in almost every part of what I do here. It’s implicit in the way I avoid actual music reviews; it’s implicit in the way I avoid citing authoritative sources on anything; it’s implicit in the way my language is, though analytical and probing, ultimately structured as local opinion; it’s implicit in how many words I devote to qualifying and hedging; it’s implicit in the way my most time intensive pieces of writing are out of the way and framed as supplemental, framed as secondary and unimportant; it’s implicit in the underlying tone of my writing, which is often intentionally snarky, unprofessional, and vaguely self-deprecating.

The assumption is that I don’t know shit. You don’t know shit. Nobody knows shit. If you think you know shit, you definitely do not know shit. The idea that you think you or anyone can accurately identify what makes something “good” or “bad” is laughable. Oh, sure, you can try. I know I try. Hoo boy do I ever try. But I can’t know, because nobody can know, because we all know shit.

If there’s one thing I believe in beyond the shadow of a doubt, it’s hedging. So I listen to “bad” music. I refuse to make any absolute dismissals. I leave myself open to the possibility of being wrong about even the music I despise. I hedge. ‘Cause I don’t know shit, and I probably never will.

That’s called “alt text”, or “hover text”. I use it to list my favorite songs by the artist that’s being hovered over. S-Ranks get their top five favorite songs. A’s get their top four, B’s their top three, C’s their top two, and D’s/F’s their single top song, according to me. It’s literally just which songs I like the best, roughly in order. Sometimes there are question marks in place of a song. That just means I haven’t decided what my favorite songs by that person are, whether that’s because nothing stood out to me or because there was too much good stuff to choose from or whatever. When my favorite songs change, I go in and change the alt text, so it should always be current.

That’s all there is about that, it’s just a sneaky little feature with a little bit of bonus info for those who care to check for it.