A New Beginning

After a long absence, I have returned to this blog flush with divine inspiration. Well, not divine, really. I have been reading Slate's feature Blogging the Bible, an attempt by David Plotz to blog his way through the Hebrew Bible. It's an entertaining and interesting read, putting a lot of well-known stories in context for someone who's never read the Bible himself. But, more importantly, it's a project. That is, Plotz has set himself a goal (and an attainable goal at that) in writing about the Bible, chapter by chapter, book by book. The problem with many blogs is that they have no direction, and thus it's easy to get sidetracked with mindless posts or by just quitting altogether. But a project has a purpose, a beginning and an end, and with a goal in mind, a reason to keep posting.

So then, what will my project be? My lovely wife Annie suggested something that never occurred to me - blogging my way through our music collection in alphabetically order. Sure, I could just blog about the good albums, the great songs, the best mixtapes, etc. But then, that wouldn't be a project! Going A to Z, covering the lousy albums, the brilliant albums, the embarassing albums, and everything in-between, that's a project worth blogging about.

A project, of course, needs rules. There are only 3 rules:

1) The blogging will proceed in alphabetical order by artist, chronologically by album. This is the order our collection is kept in. A note, however: Annie decided on the alphabetization style, so some artists are, to my mind, out of order. For instance, R.E.M. comes at the beginning of the R's (for shame!), and bands with number names (i.e. 10,000 Maniacs) come at the beginning.

2) Newly purchased albums will be blogged alphabetically as usual, unless that portion of the alphabet has already been passed by, in which case it would be inserted as an addendum whenever I have a chance (and something to say about it).

3) Every album in the collection must be mentioned! The post need not be profound, but the entire collection must be blogged. There are no exceptions.