random music thoughts

I ripped a CD (in 2026)

It was like I was back in 1999 again.

Why did I rip a CD? How did I do it?

I actually couldn’t remember how to do it in Windows because it had been so long. I’d used iTunes to rip most of my CD collection way back and haven’t had iTunes installed for years (and currently don’t have it installed). The first step was digging out my portable LG DVD drive, since none of my PCs have had DVD drives in them going back well over a decade now. I figured Windows Media Player (née Groove) might still support ripping CDs and it does. The process was relatively straightforward, but I had to direct it to information online to correctly tag the album, artists, and songs.

This CD ripping adventure started when I installed Deezer on my Galaxy S26, which has replaced Apple Music for me (I’ll post later about how de-Appled I am now). I prefer music to be onboard the device locally rather than chew up cell data and rely on sometimes spotty connectivity when out and aboot listening to tunes. It was when I downloaded Tales of Mystery and Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project that I remembered I’d bought the (second) CD remaster some years back and this particular edition had both the original 1987 remaster in which Parsons tweaked with some of the songs and the album fairly liberally, but also included a straight remaster of the 1976 original, altering none of the music and just cleaning up the sound quality.

Because the two versions are quite different, I wanted to go back and listen to the original again to see if I might prefer it. On Deezer this was a simple download. On the PC I use a different music program, not Deezer, so I dug out my Giant Binder of Music, found the relevant CD and let ‘er rip.

I can now listen to the original version of Tales of Mystery and Imagination at home and when on the go and in some ways, it’s better, mainly because all the new guitar bits added in the 1987 remaster feel superfluous, but I have to admit, the restored Orson Welles narration and the organ used to bridge what was once the two sides of the album into a seamless whole, both work really well.

I’m glad to have both readily available now and have even contemplated re-ripping some of my CDs at a higher bitrate now that know how to do it again. But it’s a lot of CDs and my ears are terrible, so it’s probably not worth the effort.

Probably.

Billy Joel, 1993: What did he know?

In the opening track “No Man’s Land” on Billy Joel’s last album, River of Dreams, is the line:

I’ve seen the children with their boredom and their vacant stares 

This immediately brought to mind people staring at their smartphones and scrolling endlessly through social media (which admittedly is a problem not just affecting The Youths, but everyone). The thing is, the album and song came out in 1993, which is 33 years ago as I write this.

1993 effectively predates the internet (as the public knows it) and predates social media and smart device addiction by decades.

Which makes me wonder, what did Joel know back then? Or was 1993 a lot worse than I remember?

1993, per Wikipedia.

The HNIC theme I never thought I’d hear again

Thanks to YouTube’s sometimes erratic algorithm, I was offered a video of the 1968 Hockey Night in Canada theme. Back in Duncan and growing up in the 1970s, HNIC was a Saturday night staple in our home, with the living room TV always tuned to the game. I’ve heard the theme song probably hundred of times, but the last time I heard it may have been the last time I watched HNIC, which was probably the mid 80s.

Until tonight. And hearing it again, I not only felt that intoxicating pull of nostalgia you get from childhood music, but it also struck me what a damn good theme it is. The brass section just blasts the thing. No wonder so many think of it as Canada’s unofficial second anthem.

A few thoughts on a few (old) albums

Not reviews, just thoughts!

Out of Time (R.E.M.)

After my fiasco of trying to listen to the album on a run, I grabbed it and listened to it in full a day or so later at home. I can see why people pick Automatic For the People as R.E.M.’s best album–it’s more cohesive and arguably more “mature” (it also has a better title and album art).

But Out of Time has something Automatic lacks–a sense of joyful experimentation. The band spent a lot of time experimenting in the latter half of their career, especially after drummer Bill Berry left, but a lot of it feels weird or kind of indulgent (or worse, a bit boring!)

Out of Time is a band doing new things and having a blast with it. Every member is present and fully participating–you even get two Mike Mills lead vocals (one because Michael Stipe couldn’t finish writing lyrics to “Texarkana” so Mills took over, rewrote the song, dropped any reference to Texarkana and ended up with one of the best tracks on the album).

Everyone remembers “Losing My Religion”, which centred around a mandolin, or the goofy “Shiny Happy People”–which may have had a more sinister meaning, even as the band dismissed it later as a children’s song (the video, which I’ve commented on before, is peak 90s), but the album is chock-full of what the kids call deep cuts, ranging from a rare instrumental (“Endgame”) to the eminently silly but catchy “Radio Song” in which Stipe deadpans the phrase “Hey hey hey” repeatedly. It makes excellent use of Kate Pierson of the B-52s on a couple of tracks. Even the song “Fretless”, which didn’t make the album, is great. The B-sides are A-sides.

Anyway, you should listen to it.

About Face (David Gilmour)

This was Gilmour’s second solo album, released in 1984 and when it seemed Pink Floyd was done (he would reconstitute the band without Roger Waters and release a new album three years later). Unlike his first solo effort in 1978, which has a loose, dreamy feel, About Face is What If Pink Floyd Made a Pop Album?

Gilmour has been a bit bagged on for his skill as a lyricist, but on About Face, he keeps things simple, direct–and sometimes surprisingly cheeky. My favourite example is “Cruise”, a breezy song with a soaring chorus that is, literally, about cruise missiles. Gilmour is clearly not impressed:

Saving our children, saving our land
Protecting us from things we can’t understand
Power and Glory, Justice and Right
I’m sure that you’ll help us to see the light
And the love that you radiate will keep us warm
And help us to weather the storm

“And the love that you radiate will keep us warm” is a great bit of word play.

Then:

Please don’t take what I’m saying amiss
Or misunderstand at a time such as this
Because if such close friends should ever fall out
What would there be left worth fighting about

Same for “if such close friends should ever fall out.” So cheeky.

He conscripted Pete Townsend to write three sets of lyrics and used two, the standout being “All Lovers Are Deranged”, which combines a furious guitar with lyrics both savage and droll:

You know that you don’t really fall in love
Unless you’re seventeen
The break of day will make your spirits fly
But you can’t know what it means
Unless you’re seventeen

Unlike with PF, here we get a brass section on the kicking “Blue Light” and while the album has the shadow of the Cold War hanging over it (it was 1984, after all), the whole thing remains eminently catchy and well-crafted. Apparently Gilmour was a bit dismissive of the album as being very 80s upon the release of his next solo album in 2006 (yes, 22 years later), but apart from the lyrics, it achieves a kind of timelessness as the songs swing between Gilmour’s concise acoustic strumming and him thrashing in a way he rarely did with Pink Floyd. It’s worth the nostalgia trip to see what might have been, if Pink Floyd hadn’t returned.

I am buying music again

I still have Apple Music (my partner uses it and his CD collection was lost years ago), but I’ve recently started purchasing albums again, so far digitally, but I’m also thinking about going to local indie stores hunting down CDs like it was 1995.

Today, I bought Supertramp’s 1977 Album, Even in the Quietest Moments. I used a digital service I’d never heard of before today–7Digital–which I found on this site after a search: Digital Music – Music Canada. The service seems fine. I got a zip file with the MP3 files contained within. Not as seamless as iTunes, but it also didn’t require me to install software first to grab the album.

Most of the music I listen to is stuff I already own, anyway, so all I’m really doing is just adding to my library after an extended break. I like that this music is mine and it won’t suddenly disappear or get replaced by some alternate version I may not prefer.

And even though I’m going old school with music purchases like in days gone by, this doesn’t mean I’m ready to embrace the 8-track again.

What is the newest album I own?

Not an album I can access through a streaming service, but one I bought and can play anywhere.

The answer: Wilder Minds, by Mumford & Sons, from 20151Worse, I’ve barely listened to the album, I never got into it.

Yes, the newest album I own was released 10 years ago (I bought it when it was new).

I only started listening to streaming music (via Apple Music) a few years ago, so there really is a years-long dropoff between now and when I bought my last new album. I have lamented how streaming seems to have killed the album in favour of an endless mix of random songs, but now realize I’m part of the problem!

I’m slowly rectifying this, though. The past few weeks, I’ve been listening to albums on my runs instead of shuffling songs. The albums are admittedly ancient, for the most part, but it’s a start.

Let’s see what’s new out there…

I can ease your pain

A few years back I had my ears tested and the guy who tested them, a professional ear-testing guy (I forget the term and I know I could look it up, but I have posts to crank out, and I’m falling behind), had kind of a grave look on his face during the test. I probably did, too.

You know how when you’re taking a multiple choice exam at school and you have this feeling that you’re getting all the answers wrong somehow?

That’s what this ear test was like, especially when he moved to my right ear.

My left ear was rated not great, definitely some hearing loss.

My right ear was basically terrible. Like, you can hear things, but everyone below the age of 20 will be like they’re talking inside a cone of silence or something. Just a huge swathe of my hearing range gone.

Why? I was in my 50s, which I have been assured is not old and is, in fact, the new 30s. Thirty-year olds don’t have bad hearing.

But I did listen to loud (and often terrible) pop music on headphones when I was young. Was the volume too high at times? Probably.

More recently, in 2010 I dated a guy for a while, and we went to a club that was having some kind of contest and there were judges at a table, plus very bug speakers pumping out music at very high volume. We were standing near one of the speakers. My right ear was the closest part of my body to it. I remember after leaving the club, my right ear rang for a long time. It felt like my hearing had been permanently damaged. Probably because it had been.

Then the guy said he wanted to break up. This admittedly had nothing to do with my ear (as far as I know).

The worst part of this loss of hearing was I could tell how bad it was by listening to some of my favourite music. For example, in the song “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd. It features Roger Waters singing the line, “Just a little pinprick” followed by what sounds like a triangle going PING. I could no longer hear the PING. Where once was a PING, now there was now nothing. It made me very sad.

Tonight, I did an experiment where I reversed the left/right channels of my earphones (by cleverly wearing them backwards) and played the song, because this would make the PING go to my left ear, which is not completely destroyed yet. I nervously waited for the song to get to that part, noting (not a music joke) that the song so far actually sounded pretty much the same, indicating that the mix was, as the professionals say, balanced.

When it got to the PING…I heard it! It was faint, but I definitely heard it. So now I can still hear the PING, as long as I listen to music in reverse stereo. Or maybe when I get some sort of hearing aids, which I am totally too vain and silly to do.

Anyway, in a world where so much seems to be collapsing all around us, it was nice to know the PING has not completely vanished for me.

The song most stuck in my head in 2024 is from 1976

And that song is “The Things We Do For Love” by 10cc, released as a single late in 1976. It was a big hit in Canada, peaking at #1, and I clearly remember it all over the radio at the time (I was about 13 years old, so just developing my taste–or lack thereof–in music). I found the song to be catchy, but schmaltzy, and declared it worthy of being mocked. I mocked it, with my friends, because we were extremely cool kids in our own minds.

The song resurfaced for me when I watched a few pop songs on YouTube from the late 70s/early 80s, which told the YouTube algorithm that I wanted to watch these videos to the exclusion of everything else, thus my home page became clogged with almost nothing but. One of the songs clogging things up was “The Things We Do For Love” and it made me reassess this now 48-year-old song. And it’s still schmaltzy, and still catchy, but there is more to it, that almost indefinable something that makes it more than just a tidy pop song.

I’m not a music-titian, so I can’t use the proper terminology to describe the things, but as a layperson, it comes down to these:

  • The song starts with lush background vocals that serve as an intro, swelling to the “start” of the song. It’s a welcome variation from the usual verse/chorus structure.
  • Piano and guitar are both featured and used well.
  • The lyrics, given the song title, are not as banal and mindless as one might expect. They’re not deep, either, but at least they’re not cringe-inducing.
  • Did I mention the background vocals?
  • The whole production is very lush and layered for a pop song.

The only down note (ho ho) is the way it fades at the end, as was the style at the time. It’s not terrible, but it still makes me think, “They didn’t know how to end the song.”

And they actually made a video for it, which is positively quaint. The two main band members appear to have just walked off the street and picked up their instruments, which is a fair bit better than having them wear matching sequinned jumpsuits.

I can’t say the song has made me want to check out the entire 10ccc oeuvre, but I did listen to “Not in Love” later and almost a half century later, I finally learned this is the song featuring the repeated, whispered vocal “Big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry”, which my friends and I mercilessly mocked at the time. It still comes across as just kind of weird in 2024, but at least I now know where the weirdness originated.

Anyway, that’s my Song of the Year 2024. I know I’ve heard contemporary music, too, but can’t think of a single song that stuck with me.

The real reason why music is getting worse…

…is the title of a Rick Beato video on YouTube. You can watch it below.

Rick attributes the current state of pop music (bad) to two things:

  1. Music is really easy to make now, thanks to various software and hardware tools
  2. Music is really easy to listen to now, thanks to streaming services

I think he’s right. In the video he lays out how much work went into recording a typical rock band, with drums alone requiring multiple mics (and a good drummer), where today it’s…a drum machine. Vocalists needed to sing on pitch, and the opportunity to fix mistakes originally meant having to re-record. Then came autotune, pitch correction software and the equivalent for instruments. Now anyone could sing, and the voice could be processed any way you like. When something hit, it was easy to reproduce…and was, by everyone looking to score a hit. The sheer volume of music increased as it became easier to make. And this is before you even consider the horror of AI-generated music.

As he notes, over 100,000 songs were added to streaming services over the last year, a rate of about one per second. This isn’t a stream, it’s a torrent1See what I did there?.

Then he explains how music in the olden times (my time) was something to be sought, acquired and savoured. Sure, it feels a bit “I had to walk both ways uphill in the snow” but again, he’s right. I remember saving for an album, having to go to the record store to buy it, take it home, then listen to it. If I liked it, I might loan it to a friend. Buying an album was a thing. Today, for $10.99 a month (about what one of those albums used to cost), you get a virtually endless supply of music on demand. You don’t have to seek it out, it’s just there, in an app. Combined with the sheer volume (heh heh) of the music output, it cultivates a feeling, especially in those who are growing up with streaming services, that music is nothing special–it’s just background noise. Don’t like a song? Just skip to the next random track. Let the software build a playlist for you. You don’t need to do anything, just listen. There is no investment, no value. It’s product.

And everything kind of sounds the same.

As I’m typing this, I’m listening to Boney M’s Nightflight to Venus, a 1978 album that gleefully celebrates its disco roots. It’s silly, bonkers, but also super catchy, with terrific harmonized vocals. It even covers a nice variety of styles, not just disco. I mean, it has a cover of “King of the Road.”

Today, an equivalent album would likely be composed on a computer, probably feature hyper-processed autotuned vocals, a drum machine and probably no actual guitars. It would be musical sludge, a pile of muck in a larger pile of indistinguishable muck. But hey, there’s a million other songs on tap, so just skip to something else if you don’t like it. The pool is big.

Anyway, the video is worth a watch, and helps explain why I spend more time listening to my ripped CD collection in Windows Media Player than I do listening to the nigh-endless selection of songs on Apple Music2Consider that I started buying my own music around 1977, which is 38 years before Apple Music existed.

Rediscovering old music

I wished my living room had looked like this when I was 30. (Image generated through NightCafe)

I don’t mean old-timey music like ragtime or something, rather I’m talking about eschewing a streaming service like Apple Music and going back to my old music collection, which consists mostly of CDs I’ve purchased and ripped over the past 30+ years. All of the files are local, tucked into a folder on my PC. The app to play them, Windows 11’s Media Player, provides album art and metadata, and that’s it. It doesn’t curate, recommend, provide radio stations, “for you” or anything else. It just lets you listen to your music library.

And it’s kind of refreshing. I can listen for hours and know I’m not burning bandwidth (I know I have the bandwidth, it’s more a principle thing). There’s a tangibility that’s missing with streaming. And everything is something I’ve already picked out, bought and listened to many times already. There is a welcome familiarity, but also a chance to revisit albums (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is) I haven’t listened to in years. Certain music invokes memories of other times and places. It’s weird and, usually, kind of wonderful.

Unlike my phone, which has a truncated version of my music library, the PC has everything, so when I hit shuffle, I never quite know what will come up. I like that.

Now I’m off to listen to Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe, which sounds more like a law firm than a majority of the members of Yes.

What if music streaming suddenly disappeared?

Spotify has been in the news recently, and it has not been good news:

  • They’re pulling out of Uruguay because that country wants them to pay artists fairly
  • They’re also laying off 17% of their workforce (over 1,500 people)

On the second item, I do wonder why they needed so many people. Like many tech companies, they got silly with hiring during the pandemic, so some cuts were inevitable.

But the layoffs, Uruguay demanding fair payment and Spotify essentially saying, “We can’t pay artists fairly and also survive” made me wonder if we’ll eventually reach a point where music streaming transforms from what it is now–a frankly shockingly inexpensive way to have what is essentially endless music–to something else. Some possibilities:

  • All music streaming services start raising prices…a lot. Let’s call it The Netflix Effect because if anyone knows anything about regular price hikes, it’s Netflix. I think most people would grumble and keep paying as monthly prices climbed from $10-11 to $15. They’d get cranky at $17-18, but would still keep paying. $20 (or, let’s be realistic, what the companies would bill as $19.99) crosses a psychological barrier. We’re now twice as expensive as what people were used to. But still, I think few would bail. In fact, I feel they could raise prices to at least $30 before you’d start seeing people go without, and even those numbers would be small enough to be more than offset by the price hikes. I figure you’d need to hit around $50 a month to really get people to stop. And then we’d probably be looking at Napster: The Next Generation happening.
  • Streamers that aren’t currently owned by big tech (like Spotify) would be gobbled up by big tech. People idly speculate about Microsoft buying Spotify, for example. Why would this happen? Because the music streaming business is so marginal (Spotify has over 200 million paid subscribers and still manages to lose money) that it’s only appealing to big tech companies that can subsidize the service, keeping it as a way to get or keep people in their ecosystem (people using Apple Music will buy iPhones to listen, etc.1Yes, Apple has an Apple Music app for Android phones, but I suspect it’s a tiny market vs. iPhone)
  • A less likely scenario is companies giving up on streaming services altogether, and we go back to music as it was 15 years ago, when you listened to the radio (“Mommy, what’s a radio?”), bought albums on iTunes (iTunes, shudder) or went to a physical store to buy an actual spinning disc. I mean, most people would do the latter through Amazon, but you get the point. This would have a couple of interesting effects: I think people would buy far less music and, by that same token, listen to a lot less new music. People would get picky again, and more conservative, sticking more to known bands and performers. It’s even possible the album format could see a revival of sorts if it was no longer ridiculously easy to flip through dozens of songs with a few clicks or taps. Maybe those cheesy CD music compilations would become a thing again. But I think the odds of streaming music going away entirely is very unlikely, so this is really just playing out “What if?” scenarios for fun (but not profit).

Of the above scenarios, I think the first–price increases–is the likeliest. And we’ve already had some recently. I’m sure more are on the way.

Pyramid is a fun album

photo of great pyramid of giza
Photo by Simon Berger on Pexels.com

Yes, I used the F word.

Pyramid is the third album from The Alan Parsons Project, released in 1978. It’s one of their best and here’s why, in no particular order:

  • Released at the height of disco, it exists completely outside of disco, achieving a timelessness so many great albums have.
  • At a mere 37:46 minutes long, this is an amazingly compact album (especially by prog rock standards), yet even in its economy it manages to pack in nine songs that include six vocalists, three instrumentals, a choir, tolling bells and a tuba solo.
  • Speaking of tuba solos, Pyramid isn’t afraid to go from the sublime to the ridiculous. The epic centrepiece, “In the Lap of the Gods”, an instrumental featuring the aforementioned tolling bell, choir and lush orchestration, is followed by “Pyramania”, which includes a tuba solo and lyrics like, “I consulted all the sages I could find in Yellow Pages/But there aren’t many of them.”
  • The concept (more a theme, really) comes through more directly here than on other APP albums. Every song echoes fears of death, of inevitability, regret and loss. The one exception is the final instrumental, “Hyper-Gamma-Spaces”, a trippy reprieve that focuses mainly on keyboards.

It’s a zany, mysterious grab bag of doom. Give it a listen on your favorite streaming service and soak in the experience of vocals without autotune.