The Premise

 

I've been collecting records for over 50 years and CDs since they first appeared in the 1980s. By this point I have thousands upon thousands of titles in each format, and physical space to contain them has become such an issue that I often have to decide to get rid of one title if I want to add another. And yet I continue to seek out and add new titles to the collection on a regular basis. Add to this the salient fact that with this many titles, I can probably only listen to any given title once every several years without also neglecting the thousands of other titles in my collection, all of which lead me to ask myself before each new purchase or when I discover that I have something I completely forgot about, Do I really need this record or CD?

This blog is an attempt to justify why every new record or CD I buy is absolutely necessary, as well as revisit past purchases to assess whether they are still worth the space they are taking up on my shelves and perhaps prohibiting me from adding something else that I now want more. At the same time, it is my hope that my examinations of each title might expose any poor souls who wander by this blog to music they haven't heard or considered previously, or perhaps a particular release of more familiar titles that may be worth an upgrade from other versions. In any case, I won't be doing the deep-dive exhaustive reviews one can find elsewhere but what I hope are pithy snapshots to elicit further exploration. And by the way, the cover photo includes but a fraction of the collection.