The Big Music Project

August has, sadly, become too quiet of a month on the work front.

Oh, speaking of which, it's looking like I'll be moving Doubleheader to 4pm in the very near future. Stay tuned.

Anyway, August winds up being a time to catch up on things (not that I ever catch up).

I'm a fairly meticulous, organized person and I used to really pride myself on how my music was set up.

The CD bookcase or cassette drawers or album crates had be just right. Same went for digital music.

Time and other responsibilities takes some of that away. Then I discovered that, somehow, all of the hard work that I put into organizing my iTunes (or whatever music software you choose) had gotten fairly messed up.

So I've begun the process of cleaning it up. It's a fairly intense thing that I'm doing in stages because literally hundreds of albums got screwed up. Album titles were lost along with data like the year of the album and track numbers.

Again, this is a "me" problem. But it's a good process for myriad reasons.

For one, it's good for my soul to work through the reorganization. It's nice to zone out and focus on this one thing. It's hard to explain, and likely sounds frivolous to you, but it's been a good thing.

But it also means reviewing the good and the bad. I've been given a lot of music over the years. I've also purchased a lot. So you see where you've acquired things that are...er...not the best call. Or things that might surprise you that I own.

Guilty pleasures? Check. Embarrassing items? Check and double check.

But I'm also a bit of a music hoarder in that you never know when a song will catch your attention for whatever reason (good or bad). Maybe I can use it for audio production. Maybe I'll decide I like it. Maybe somebody wants a copy of it.

Still, you also find yourself reviewing your life in such a task.  There's a lot of remembering where I was when I heard "that song."

It's a journey that has its ups and downs.

But it's also freeing, in that I've allowed myself to look at some of the albums that need fixing and realize I'll literally never play (and never remember I had it). For one thing, it was wonderful to look at a-ha's Hunting High and Low that had been sitting at the top of the list alphabetically and say, "Adios, a-ha! Take on THIS!"

It felt great, actually, for some reason.

There were some other things that I had picked up that were bad bootlegs with questionable sound quality. Again, gone.

So it's been good.

It will take a long while. I'm only into the "D's," going by first name of the artist, and I can see Don Henley has a lot of fixing to do.

The Beatles also took some time, but one must be meticulous when working with the GOATs.

There are also a bunch of songs that have only a song title but no artist or album. So, as you can see, this is sort of daunting.

But it's worth it to me.

I hope to get it done, but I'm not setting a timetable. It's just something I'll do when I have some time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there are some old Dave Matthews Band albums that need fixing.

Arts Marching, indeed.