The Plan

I think I've fallen out of love with music. Blame it on digitization, Napster, auto-tune, the 1,000 songs I've never heard (or only heard once) on my iTunes, file sharing, downloading or the general musical rut I've been in lately. But like an alcoholic going through the 12 steps, I'll start by admitting I have a problem.

I've become disconnected from my personal music collection. It's lost and forgotten in a jungle of bits and bytes, and instead of searching in the dark corners of my iPod's hard disk, I stick close to the beaten path and same old albums. Out of the nearly 4,000 individual songs on my pod, I only regularly listen to about 400 of them. But not anymore.

To aide my musical memory, I'll approach this journey like the animal it is. I plan to go through every individual artist on my iPod, in alphabetical order, and listen to at least one or two albums from each--start to finish, no skipping the filler songs.

To make things easier on myself, I won't count collaborations as their own separate thing, but group them with a primary artist (I don't have much rap, but it would take forever to get through every song "featuring" someone).

From there, I hope to uncover some dusty sonic soundscapes that have slipped my memory, or maybe even a few that never made it in there to begin with.

But more than that, I hope to explore some of the bygone bands from my past and open the door to a more varied, enriched musical future. As an alum of the early to mid-2000s Denver hardcore/metalcore scene, my musical tastes tend to fall in line with that same genre.

However, there are more than a few curveballs in my collection (Frank Sinatra and Ashley Simpson come to mind) and, after all, isn't this whole thing about getting away from the familiar?

Of course, since I'm writing for the entire world to see, my process is democratic. All music is created equal; it just takes time and attention to decide what stays or goes, but on an objective level there is no inherently "bad" music. It's one of the basic tenets of this experiment. I want to inform others as much as myself about how I listen to and appreciate music, and vice versa. Any suggestions, questions, insights, rantings and insults are welcome--and probably well-deserved.

But more importantly, I would love to ignite the spark of discovery in someone else. If you feel as I do and want to reacquaint yourself with your entire music library, take my experiment and make it your own. The only thing I ask is to share with me your personal experience using the "iPod A to Z" technique. If you're down, then so am I.

Let's go hunting.