Daniel's Place

How do you listen to music?

Singles that top the charts are fun. That song you can listen to four times in a row and not get tired of. Go ahead and push repeat, it’s one of my guilty pleasures too.

After a while though, a single gets too repetitive. So I’m glad music comes in albums.

An album is an experience, a full musical meal composed by the band that offers a little more insight than that four minutes of foreplay. Albums have their own track ordering, selection and deliberately flow. Once I’ve discovered I like a band, I hop into their albums. Once I’ve heard the entire album a few times, I will play it through again and again (though not back to back, that’d just be crazy). Good albums, like King Crimson’s THRAK follow a very deliberate flow that make the entire album a musical piece in itself with musical waves larger than individual songs.

Of course, I will skip some tracks; not everything a band slaps on an album is musically tolerable (e.g. The Gutter Twins’ poetic but musically crappy All Misery/Flowers hurts their otherwise masterful Saturnalia).

In my experience, listening to the whole album instead of a smaller selection of songs stretches the listenable lifespan of the band. Hopefully until their next album. For some people, that may be a little too much Led Zeppelin. For me? It’s usually the right amount.

When I was younger, I remember saying to myself that I was born too late. If I had grown up in the 70’s or 80’s I would’ve wrecked shop.I would have the technical vision to bring humanity to its present or better. And even if I was just a small participant, I would have done well. It would have been easy to see how all the pieces fit together.

Of course, this thought only makes sense with an impossibly futuristic dosage of hindsight. It should be more along the lines of: If I had grown up in the 70’s or 80’s, knowing what I know now, I would’ve wrecked shop. Futurists, authors, and strangers on the street profess to know which way the winds of change are blowing. What do they know? They’re not from the future and neither are we.

The fact of the matter is that we don’t understand what is coming next and only a few people can see and act on the relevant facets in this world to produce the “killer” program, product, or idea. Venture capital groups invest in loads of start-ups with the expectation that only a few of them will pan out in the marketplace. While this strategy seems to work, the world is so unpredictable that even our brightest and wealthiest minds make egregious errors (see also: everyone who trusted Bernard Madoff).

Now what?

To date I have not produced any killer apps, wrecked shops, or created any history-changing feats of innovation. But I have seen and studied people who have. One thing is clear to me: they work smart and they’re lucky.

Great! I’ll approach every problem with a premium on the users’ laziness, and keep rolling the dice.