Weekend posts are a chance to revisit songs that have happy memories, not of anything in particular, other than just hearing the tunes.
Many of these songs were tracks that I played during my 90s stint as an Alternative/Modern Rock radio show. They're tunes that I hardly hear these days, but are wonderful to revisit.
Click on the "Weekend Posts" label below, to see other posts like this.
I was thinking about other people's record collections---I do that sort of thing.
You can often learn a lot about someone from the contents of their record collection. That is, if they are the kind of person who buys a fair number of albums.
But what about the folks who don't buy a lot of music---generally, they are somewhat inscrutable via their record collection, because a) there's not a lot of data to be mined, and b) they tend to have the same handful of albums.
I mean, if you are my age and you went to college in the late 80s/early 90s and you had a friend who only had 10 CDs, odds are pretty good that their record collection contained, several, if not all of the following:
Bob Marley/Legend
Boston/Boston
Steve Miller Band/Greatest Hits
Paul Simon/Graceland
R.E.M./Out Of Time or Green
Something by The Beatles
U2/The Joshua Tree
Van Halen/1984
Prince/Purple Rain
INXS/Kick
In other words, they probably owned some pretty conventional, crowd-pleasing, easily-consumed records.
Which is why my girlfriend's best friend was a bit of a mysterious anomaly.
She literally only had about 10 cassettes, but they were the kinds of albums that you weren't going to run into by accident. Hip stuff that you didn't really hear on the radio, or blasted from speakers at a frat party. Music that you would have to dig to find.
And if you were the kind of person who would dig to find music, in theory, you'd have to be passionate enough about it, to want to get more than just 10 cassettes worth.
Her entire music collection didn't fill a shoebox, but it was through her that I learned the phrase, "You'll dance to anything by The Communards!"
I'm the Program and Music Director of mvyradio, a broadcast and internet station on the Island of Martha's Vineyard. You can hear it here.
I've been in radio since the early 90s, programming shows. As Music Director, I receive dozens of CDs and songs every week, from Record Labels, Promotion People and Independent Artists. I try to listen to everything anyone asks me to.
So the old iTunes list is pretty long.
The idea of this blog is to go to that list, grab one (usually at random, but not always) and write about it. Every song has a story. How it fits into the artists oeuvre. What it meant to me when I first heard it.
I'll try to post the song in full, whenever possible, and I invite you to listen and tell me what it makes you think of.
And for more great music, you can stream mvyradio from anywhere in the world, here.