Playing music by year

I’m finally getting around to rebuilding some of my iTunes playlists that got lost in the great computer crash a few months ago.  I’m cutting together the audio for the new show Freddy and I recorded and I need constant breaks.  Is it a bad sign that I can only listen to my voice for twenty minutes or so before I need to tear the headphones off my head and run screaming from the room?  Well, I’m hoping that it’s just because I’m listening to that same conversation over and over, cutting and splicing it into a shorter form.  I should have the show posted by tomorrow afternoon.  If my voice has the same affect on you, please let me know and I’ll stop production immediately…

So in my breaks I’m listening to music and adding songs back into my anything goes “Bi-Polar” mix.  But I quickly got tired of sorting through the “A” bands first.  Every time I browse my music library I always get the same bands first.  A-Division, A-Ha and so on.  I have 43,000 songs, by the time I get to the “D”s I’m done looking. So a lot of my playlists are heavily weighted with bands that start early in the alphabet.  Bands like ZZ-Top and Zodiac Mindwarp don’t stand a chance!

I decided to sort the music by year.  I’m still going through it and I’m only up to 1981 but it’s so VERY cool to pick through the music chronologically.  When I browse I only pick up a few songs and play them for a few seconds.  I am really enjoying hearing these songs amongst the contemporary of what was also released that year.  While browsing, I found out a couple of things:

• I have a LOT of work to do to the library, going in and adding year-tags to all the songs.
• I don’t care what you called it at the time, Metal got started a lot earlier than people think.
• Olivia Newton-John and Frank Zappa both put out new albums every thirty-five seconds through the early 1980′s.
• I own entirely too many copies of the same songs.  Between the original album, the special re-releases, live performances, movie soundtracks and “greatest hits” CDs, I have SEVEN copies of Bob Dylan singing “Blowin In the Wind” and about eight versions by other artists.
• “Genre” and “Year” tags are useless.  Good music is timeless.