Play To Z: Hitting The Wall

Two months is a long time between posts; long in normal time and even longer in Internet Time. Whole memes have been born, bloomed, withered and died in that time. The blog has rested, untouched while Margaret Thatcher jokes pinged back and forth across Twitter and people on Facebook spoiled Game of Thrones twists for their less up-to-date friends.

  So why so long without a post? Well, because now, as I near the end of the project (less than 1000 songs to go at current count), I hit the wall. Like a marathon runner in the final third of the race, I suddenly slacked, and listening to music became an effort. So many great albums lay behind me, now unlistenable until I had reached my finish line. So many new releases floated out there on Spotify and YouTube, tempting me. And worse of all, I hit a fallow patch in my album collection, with long stretches of albums that I had little passion for, with those that I did serving as only brief oases in a desert of mediocrity.

What This Is Happening looks like after 200 songs worth of "eh"

  It is, of course, my own fault. If I kept my music collection trimmed of any fat, this project would have been absent these sort of patches and noticeably shorter. I'd probably even be done by now. But I can't beat myself up too much - every album I own is a window into a period of my life, even the bad ones. It could be a band I once loved who I have now turned sour on, an album I bought out of curiousity and never listened to again, or something lent to me by a friend on the promise that I would love it that I now keep only as evidence that, yes I have listened to it.

  The whole point of this project was to both reconnect with these albums that had fallen to the wayside and to challenge the memories I had of them. In pushing through the wall, I've discovered some albums that I had cast aside prematurely. Coming back to listen to them, I've found new depths to their sound, new meaning in their lyrics. Certain songs have popped in ways they never did before. It's a nice way to measure myself as a person, knowing that I can come to the same song I merely tolerated two or three years ago and now find deeper purpose to it.

  All that said, there's a hell of a lot of material to cover here - over a thousand songs, more than three days of music. I'm going to parcel the random observations out between a few posts in the next couple of days, sometimes going into more depth where something merits a closer look.

Where I Am Today

My name is Tim Maytom. Right now, I'm sprawled in bed in Norwich, England, writing by candlelight. It's August 21st 2012. The temperature in Norwich today was "too damn hot" and I've just finished killing a spider that made two of my best friends run shrieking up the stairs.

This is my blog for long-form writing, mostly analysis and discussion of stuff I'm interested in; from music of the pop and indie varieties to feminism, films to cookery, television to gaming.

You may have followed me here from my Tumblr http://trivia-lad.tumblr.com/ or my Twitter account https://twitter.com/trivia_lad or you may have just stumbled across me; whatever the case, welcome! Hopefully you'll find something here to entertain you.

To start with, I'll have a couple of regular articles. The first will be a bi-weekly check in as I listen to every album I own in alphabetical order. I'll be writing about rediscovering songs or whole albums I've forgotten, and the joys of the whole record in the age of the shuffle. The second will be a sort of director's commentary on a role-playing game I'm running. It revolves around a group of newly-empowered mages in a London torn apart by secret magical gang war. I'll be writing about my thought processes, how I've been building up the world in preparation, and how the various sessions unfold.

Right now, you can head over to my Tumblr to get an idea of where my interests lie (right now - banknote design, Debbie Harry and Russian cosmonauts shooting bears) or head over to esteemed friend Alex Spencer's tremendous blog, where he's just put up a podcast where he, I and three other friends pick apart the second wave of DC's New 52 comics, when we're not being distracted by American Ninja Warrior adverts.