All At One Time

 by whiteray

Sometime way back in another location, (likely about ten years ago, but I’m not going to go dig), I wrote that one of the benefits of the digital age was getting away from the album format and being able to structure a playlist of separate tracks. Sometimes, I said, pulling a track out from its familiar spot between two other tracks on an album gives the listener a different take on the selected track. (Those extractions also brought to those of us who grew up listening to albums as albums a slight feeling of rootlessness when the familiar track we’re listening to is followed by something other than the next very familiar track from the original album. That feeling is probably good for us.) 

And then, back in the LP days, if one wanted to avoid a horrendous track right in the middle of Side One of a generally great album (friends of mine in those days might have nominated “Octopus’ Garden” on Abbey Road), one had to go to the turntable and actually lift the tone arm to set it down at the start of the next track. Playlists rescued us from those tracks (as did programming the CD player during the long-ago ’90s, if we ever bothered to do that.) 

As I explored that idea back then, I wrote something (maybe) about being freed from vinyl tyranny. 

More than a year ago, as I puttered in my corner of our downstairs room. I thought, “Y’know, it might be nice to listen to Abbey Road all in order.” (Or it might have been Blood On The Tracks or maybe A Question Of Balance.) I had two ways to do that. There’s a large CD player on the other side of my desk, but I’d have to pull the CD from its spot in the stacks and walk around the desk and the keyboard and then push buttons and whatnot. 

Or I could have the search function in the RealPlayer find the tracks that made up the album and place them in running order and then listen. 

And then I wondered: Does my new CD ripper allows me to rip an entire CD into one mp3? For years, I’d used a freeware program that allowed me to do that. I’d not done entire albums but I’d done large mp3s of suites, like the medleys on Side Two of (again) Abbey Road. And maybe six years ago, when I got a new computer, that freeware program and Windows 10 didn’t like each other. So for a few years, I used RealPlayer to rip mp3s, and as much as I like most of what that program does, its ripping function is clunky and slow. 

But a couple of years ago – six months before this inner conversation took place – I’d invested in a new suite of mp3 management tools, including an mp3 ripper. I’d not dug into it very much, as I was still trying to catch up on replacing the single mp3 rips lost when my external drive crashed during the summer of 2017. Maybe the new software had a function to rip whole CDs as one mp3. 

Well, as readers might expect (or there would be no point to telling the story), it does, and at odd times over the last eighteen months, I’ve been doing just that. 

There are currently 192 tracks tagged “Full Album” on the digital shelves. At first, the selection was heavy with the Moody Blues (part of a long-delayed project reviewing all of their albums), Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. None of that is a surprise, I’m certain. 

What I find more interesting are some of the other artists whose works have come to mind and wound up in the “Full Albums” section: Three Counting Crows albums from the 1990s; two from 1969 and 1970 by Brewer & Shipley; Jim Croce’s three major label releases from the early 1970s; three by Dan Fogelberg from the 1970s (one of those with flautist Tim Weisberg); two from the 1970s British folkie Shelagh McDonald; Dusty Springfield’s Dusty In Memphis; Steve Winwood’s Arc Of A Diver; and David Gray’s 2000 album Babylon, along with multiple albums by the Allman Brothers Band, the Freddy Jones Band, Rhiannon Giddens, Shawn Phillips, Richie Havens, the Sundays, and more. 

(One absence I noted as I compiled that list is Simon & Garfunkel. That should probably be remedied.) 

I let the albums play on random as I read news or putter or play tabletop baseball. I don’t always listen purposefully, but I hear the music roll by (just like it used to during my teen and early adult years in the rec room back home on Kilian Boulevard), and I’m learning some things: I don’t really like Roxy Music’s Avalon beyond “More Than This” and the title track. The Fogelbergs wear thin after a few listens. August And Everything After by Counting Crows is a far better album than I recall. So, too, is The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby & The Range. And Steely Dan’s Aja remains a sonic masterpiece. 

It’s a long-range project, adding three or four a week. Where will it end? I dunno. Right now, I still have more than two terabytes free on the external hard drive. Will I get rid of the CDs and LPs if I get them all ripped as albums? Hell, no. 

Here’s a full album from 1989 I posted at YouTube almost four years ago that’s also found its place in the “Full Album” folder on the digital shelves: Evidence by Boo Hewerdine and Darden Smith, one of my favorite obscurities.