I bought a CD today. It was a little bit strange. I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual compact disc. I’m sure this isn’t the first one I’ve bought since I moved to LA seven years ago, but I know that since I got my iPod the number of CDs I’ve purchased is in the single digits. That is somewhat incredible.
There was a time when I was in college that I stopped at Hyde & Zeke Records and bought a CD (used) almost every day I went to class. I must have spent thousands of dollars on music. I remember at one point I looked at the huge wall-mounted media stand (that I built myself) in my first apartment and realized I had at least $500 worth of import Pearl Jam CDs alone.
Now they are all in the garage. I have stacks of them. I have stacks of stacks of them. They used to be furniture and now they are just collecting dust.
When I got my first iPod it took me months to methodically bring ten or twelve to the office every day and rip them into iTunes. (Right now my laptop is crammed full of 9,146 songs from the 1,580 albums of 1,387 artists. There are 217 songs that are orphans not connected to the correct album and there are 340 of them missing the “year” tag. Otherwise they are all properly labeled with genre, artist, etc. And The Beatles are listed as “Beatles, The” thank you. I can’t fathom people that scroll to J for John Lennon instead of L. What kind of animal are you?)
The CD I bought was The Warrior’s Code by the Dropkick Murphys. I have been digging on the Murphys since around ’03. The Dirty Glass is my favorite song of theirs. I grabbed the CD because I happened to see it while I was wandering around Best Buy. I remembered that I only had four or five of the songs from the album and the jewel case had a nifty sticker on it saying something about one of the songs being featured in The Departed. It’s a great album. Grab it if you get a chance.
The SlimServer software for managing music collections (and playing them on your SqueezeBox) lets you assign the proper artist name (“The Beatles”) and still have those songs sort under “B”. It also allows multiple artists, genres, and anything else through a special delimiter hack, which turns out to be surprisingly useful.
I bought a CD once, though not for musical purposes. I used a pair of scissors and fashioned it into a hyper-glossy throwing star, just in time to kill the ninja that was sneaking up behind me. I think the album was Tigerlily, by Natalie Merchant.