New Blog Series! : Listography

So it's been a while since "The Loop" series ended and I posted my top 10 albums and top 25 songs of 2009. I spent a lot of time over vacation thinking of what to do with this blog. Let's face it, EVERYONE HAS A BLOG. If I were to make this a "music news" site, it'd probably just be news recycled from other (better) music blogs. Not to mention that I work a regular 9 to 5(ish) job so my news would be lagging since I'm supposed to be working during those hours (ha).

I really liked having a "series" as part of this blog with the decade retrospective, so I think I'll try it again, but with a different theme. For Christmas, my coworker Todd gave me a book called "Music Listography : Your Life in (Play) Lists", which is basically a journal with pages of themes for several different "mixtapes", not to mention some really cool artwork. I really like the idea of it, very much a challenge in this iPod shuffle world of ours.

When I was in high school, up until about halfway through Senior year, I had a walkman and made mixtapes with various themes, one that I specifically remember being the "emo" mix. Some of my favorite gifts were tapes that friends made for me. There was such a personal element to all of these tapes, not only because you're hand choosing each song, but because you have to record it in real time, listen to every song in full and carefully piece it together. I loved how invested you could get into it, even moreso than a mix CD or shuffle on iTunes. I have been thinking about this for a while, but after seeing a friend's top 100 songs of the decade list, and extra free time thanks to a slow Winter concert season, I was inspired to get this going.

So here's the plan : I'm going to spend this the next few months (through the end of February) and go through some of the pages of this book and make my lists here on the not-so-personal internet. Feel free to comment on the songs or make your own list, I'm curious what everyone else feels fits these categories. I won't go through the WHOLE book, but a few fun pages. If you like it, you should buy the book and do it yourself. Books will probably last longer than the internet, anyway.

This won't be everyday (or multiple times a day) like "The Loop" was, so hopefully by being a little less daunting, I can have a little more fun with it. We've got nothing but time to explore old tunes. And maybe by March, I'll have figured out what to do with this blog. Or at least a new series.

Enjoy!
-Smashley