Deserted Discs

Bob-Dubery

A question from another web site:

"What recording artist has put out the most CDs you own but never listen to? Ideally, you'd have a large collection of titles without having listened to any of them in at least, say, two years. Bonus points if you've acquired late-period albums out of habit and then never bothered to listen....."

Bob-Dubery

I have only one large collection of anybody's titles, and I certainly listen to those.

I think the closest for me would be Terry Lee Hale. I don't have enough Bruce Cockburn (though I have some and never listen to them, which is odd because I think he's actually pretty good)

Squonk

I have this soft spot for Pat Metheny, he is brilliant but I haven't played any of his albums for more than than two years.

I most probably would buy an album if I saw one (maybe on special....)

Bob-Dubery

I think this is actually quite an interesting question because it asks why we have these discs that we don't listen to. Not the ones where buy one CD of somebody once and then decide we don't like it, but the ones where we do make repeated purchases.

I have a thing about not "getting" Joni Mitchell. I should, after all. Everybody says she's a great songwriter and generally a genius. "Everybody" includes a couple of people whose work I regard very highly. So I bought a disc. And it didn't do much for me. So a bit later I bought another. It's a bit better, but I still don't feel the love.

Maybe I should buy a third?

Though I haven't had the same happen with James Taylor or Leonard Cohen.

Yet.

But Terry Lee Hale? THere's an artist I actually do enjoy. If I had to play desert island discs I would definitely nominate his song "Forget About Love". Yet there's his discs just sitting there and not getting played. I think I have 5 or 6. Like I said, not a big sample.

My CD collection is not a massive one. It's fairly wide spread. The obvious big blip would be Richard THompson, I have nearly everything he's done and that's 40 something titles. I have 7 or 8 by Loudon Wainwright. Hmmmm.... maybe 4 or 5 of James Phillips. There's another artist I got a bee in my bonnet about and then haven't listened to the discs much since. If I scrape around for the tapes (and if I had a tape player) I'd have most of Led Zeppelin.

A lot of it is to do with what's in my car at any given time. I get a few discs in there and that's what I listen to. If I don't change what's in the car then nothing else gets a listen. I need to have a policy of strict rotation at regular intervals.

Time as well. Where does the time go? If I had time I could listen to a lot more music and listen to it in a more searching way. The more I play music, it seems, the less I listen to it.

Bob-Dubery

Squonk wrote I have this soft spot for Pat Metheny, he is brilliant but I haven't played any of his albums for more than than two years.

I most probably would buy an album if I saw one (maybe on special....)

Strictly speaking that doesn't qualify. If you buying everything that Metheny put out but never listened to it then we could really get you on the couch and ask if you were breast fed and all the rest of it.

dee

I think we go into a bit of an "autopilot" at times, and automatically purchase new albums from certain artists we are used to.

Spyke

Mine would have to be Zebrahead, 3 Days Grace and strangely enough, Nirvana.

They were listened to death once upon a time but have received minimal airtime over the last two years or so.

Jack-Flash-Jr

Part of the problem is ease of accessibility for me... I buy a lot of music from emusic, including artists that I liked their first album, but then only get around to listening to the follow ups once. I buy more music than I can digest and some artists get lost in the priority list...

Reinhard

I have a bunch of Stevie Ray Vaughan discs I havent listened to in ages, probably more than 5 years ago. My Joe Bonamassa discs haven't been spun in a while, but I put his album Blues deluxe in the car this morning with some Chuck Berry :d

It's just quicker putting an mp3 on than putting a cd on and switching between artitsts, as lazy as that sounds. Which is basically why I started putting my CD collection on rotation in my car.

AlanRatcliffe

I am a bit of a completist as far as Zappa goes - going on nearly 60 albums, probably only 15 of which I listen to in any given year. Some of it (like Civilisation Phaze III or The Yellow Shark) is a bit too difficult to listen to regularly (although Jazz from Hell has been growing steadily on me and gets more and more playtime each year). A few are even really bad (Thing-Fish) and some of the earlier recordings I cannot listen to because of the recording quality (I have the same problem with most of Hendrix's output).

I like having most of it though, as there is a lot of stuff that is interesting because you can hear how the songs were rearranged to suit the exact skills of a particular band or because you get to discover snippets of themes that were later expanded on or worked into completely different compositions. Sometimes I find instrument tracks in their original context - recognising them as parts that were lifted and used three decades later in a remix of another version of the same song (or with solos, sometimes even a different song!) recorded in a third era. It's like treasure hunting. ?

I've stopped buying the newer stuff released since his death though - the live stuff lacks the meticulous studio technique that elevated his recordings from being slightly different versions of the same old songs, and the studio stuff is mostly far too unfinished. In other words, it lacks what Zappa called the "eyebrows".