$17 Music Collection

My favorite way to buy music is still on CD, particularly used CDs. CDs were the first essentially perfect way to distribute music. They may be the last way to really own it. As long as I own that disc, I can use the music on any device that exists now or in the future. I can make as many copies as I like. I can sell or give the disc away, and nobody can do a damn thing about it.

So three or four times a year I go over to SecondSpin.com and load up on cheap CDs. Some of the CDs I love the most sell for a few dollars each. Here are six of my favorites you can get for $4 or less:

• Dwight Yoakam, This Time $2 This is, without question, the perfect country music album. For just $5 more, you can add Gone, which is also the perfect country album.


• Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers $3 You're may be sick of the big hit from this album (Stacey's Mom), but every track is great.


• Kim Richey, Bitter Sweet $4 There usually aren't many used Kim Richey CDs out there. They are all fantastic - this is one of her most thoughtful and touching albums.


• Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road $4 Great southern rock / folk. The title song makes me feel like I'm about 5 years old, back in the South around 1970. But it's good.


• Joan Osborne, Relish $2 This is another album with one huge hit (I won't name it). It must have sold millions of copies, because used discs are cheap as dirt. Personally, I like all the songs here - each one tells a story.


• Sonia Dada, Day at the Beach $2 One reviewer calls this an "amalgamation of soul, pop, rock, blues, and gospel." That's about right. Call it what you will, it's great poetry set to great music. For less than $20, you could pick up all six Sonia Dada albums. An ex-girlfriend turned me onto this band ... so every cloud does have a silver lining.
  

Seven Albums

Today, I received seven albums in the mail:

• Kim Richey, Chinese Boxes
• Fountains of Wayne, Traffic and Weather
• Ivy, In the Clear
• Shawn Colvin, These Four Walls
• Sarah Harmer, All of Our Names
• Joan Osborne, Pretty Little Stranger
• Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out

It's a good haul. I buy all of my CDs used (at SecondSpin.com), so finding a particular album is a combination of luck and patience. Maybe it's the holiday season, but a lot of good music became available all at once, so I jumped. According to iTunes, these albums represent Alternative, Country, Folk, Pop, and Jazz. My musical taste is growing in all directions at once.

I've listened to Brubeck and the new Fountains of Wayne, and I'm listing to In the Clear as I write this. All are excellent. When Fountains of Wayne is playing, I really listen. I want to hear every lyric, get every joke, see every image. Jazz is different. I tend to zone out, daydreaming, and only occasionally coming back to consciously hear the music. But the daydreams are pleasant.

I'm particularly happy that Kim Richey has come out with a new CD. Her album Rise is one of my favorites (Electric Green -- wow). I'll be happy if Chinese Boxes is half as good.

iPod Madness

During the month, I “won” an iPod Shuffle at work. Actually, this was part of an award from October of last year, but it only caught up with me this month. It’s a great device, with simple controls – perfect for using while driving. It charges directly from the USB port of a laptop, and it has twice the memory (512M) of my old iRiver. But there’s always a “but.” It intermittently loses connection to my laptop. I took it to the Apple store, and because Honeywell purchased the device in January of 2006, it’s out of warranty. So I bought a second-generation Shuffle, got it home, and had exactly the same problems.

When I went to the Apple store, my first iPod wouldn’t talk at all to my laptop. Later that day I synched it on Jim’s Mac, and sense the it will talk occasionally to my laptop. For now, I’m going to keep both, but if I continue to have these problems, I’ll take the other one back and give the first one away.

Someday, computers are going to work reliably. It will be a freaking revolution. Seriously – so many large software projects fail. We don’t have a good way to visualize very complex systems and projects – like large computer programs, genetic codes, etc. Some day we will find a way and it will revolutionize many seemingly unrelated fields.