If you have come here, and to this page specifically, you are probably wondering “what the hell is the point of this site?” Allow me to elaborate.

This idea for this site came to me one night as I was going through my extensive iTunes library. I have near 13,000 songs in my iTunes library as of this moment. I used to have over 15,000 songs until I culled the ones I knew I didn’t like at all, or that were so messed up they couldn’t be listened to again. (I have moved my library frequently from computer to computer, survived a few hard drive crashes, and much more that has made some data become corrupted.)

Full iTunes count as of 10-11-2009

Full album count, after following rules, as of 10-11-2009

I came to realize that I am a collector. Not that I didn’t know this before as I have collected many different things throughout my life ranging from dead Macintosh computers to comic books all the way through various depictions of the Grim Reaper. What I realized this time is that I am a collector of music and movies, and where music is concerned I have made some dubious purchases in the past as well as some items that I have never listened to at all.

There are movies I own that I have never taken out of their shrink wrap. CDs I own that were opened but never touched until I imported them into my iTunes library, and even then were set to not play during shuffle so I have never listened to them. This seemed such a waste and a clog on my computer system that I came up with a project to help me, once and for all, to clear out the unneeded and unwanted from my iTunes library.

Since just listening to all of this music would take me an estimated 32.6 days of straight 24/7 listening, I needed some device to allow me to actually listen to the music instead of skipping over the vast majority of them like I usually do. Something to allow me to listen to this music, in a non-shuffle way, that would take the time during the day I usually listen to music and put it to good use.

You have come to that device. The device I chose was a blog, as so many people these days do, but I have set some rules of how I am going to do this to make it interesting not only to myself but hopefully those reading this blog.

The rules I have set for myself:

• All songs will be listened to by album – A special playlist will be created that sorts the music included in this project by album name. This guarantees that there will not be huge blocks of the same artist, offers some depth to the offerings as they are posted, and doesn’t burn me out while writing about it. This also means that any songs I have that have no album information (such as freebies from artist websites that were never commercially released) will not be covered here. My apologies to Milla Jovovich as she has a beautiful voice, but there has been no commercial release for the tracks I have from her.
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• All posts will have personal information (where applicable) – Not my phone number or length of my penis but memories. Memories of where I first heard the song, what the song means to me and why it means that. I, and many others, have long said that “music is the soundtrack to life, if you but listen”. If music is the soundtrack, consider this blog the screenplay.
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• No Beatles – Yeah, no Beatles. Look, I have a lot of Beatles music. A LOT. So does everybody else for that matter, and as of 09/09/09 even more people are going to have Beatles music. The Beatles have been written extensively about for damned near 50 years so why would I write about them? Better authors have written about them and I will leave The Beatles to those better than I. I will, however, write about songs of theirs covered by other artists.
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• No comedy albums – This is a tricky one. No comedy albums does not mean I am going to forget all about Weird Al. He is definitely going to be included in here, but I am going to forget about George Carlin. As much as I love the guy and the comedy he brought to us this blog is about the music. If there is a song to be had on the album then it will be included, but not the stand-up portion of the album. You will get Robin Williams doing “Grim Rapper” but you won’t get Mitch Hedberg talking about straws or Chris Rock talking about crack houses. Get the idea?

• Embarrassing songs must be included – Those guilty pleasures. Those songs you listen to when no one else is around. The ones you would never be caught knowing the lyrics to in public and deride because of the fear that everyone will think you are weird for enjoying those songs. Every single one of them will be included.

• No backtracking – Since the playlist will be created from a specific date (to be announced), I will keep to the library from that date forward. This means that if I add music (which I tend to do all the time) where the album title falls within albums I have already posted about, I will not post about that album. I will keep moving forward through the playlist. This does not, however, stop my posting about an album added that falls within titles I have not posted about. This gives some leeway to albums that are released after this project starts.

Other rules will be added as needed, but I think the above will suffice for the majority of the project.

Understanding how my iTunes library is populated is important to understanding this project. In the majority are three things; discographies, singles, and compilations. This means I will have either the whole works of an artist (to a point), singles put out by flash in the pan artists or artists I do not enjoy but like one of their songs, or compilations such as a Time Life series about the 1980s that collects many different songs from a vast array of artists.

This is why I have designated “by album” as the best way to perform this project otherwise there would be huge chunks of posts about Alice Cooper, Metallica, Rob Zombie, Johnny Cash, Bon Jovi, and Meat Loaf for weeks on end with no break. As much as I enjoy the works by those artists this would become tedious for myself and boring for you, the reader.

If you have any thoughts on how to make this exercise better please drop me a line below. I will gladly take any and all advice into consideration. On the same note, feel free to share your stories in the comments section of each post. Let myself and others know your memories, thoughts, and feelings of the music talked about on here.