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My name is.....and I am a compliationaholic.

I think a compilation of different artists for exercising or driving, homemade with love, care and attention, is a wonderful thing. And so is a good radio station, if there is such a thing any more.

But I am starting to wonder: although it seems I am one of the first to get sucked into buying a newly repackaged, remastered, reprinted liner notes blah blah blah archive of music, it is finally beginning to dawn on me that I NEVER listen to ANY of them.

And given that these collections are hardly cheap, I have probably wasted more money on them than any subset of my CD collection.

The remastered Steely Dan catalogue? I never listen to it. Every Stevie Wonder track ever recorded? I must own at least three collections and I never want to listen to any of them. All of the Bowie singles on 2 CDs? Bores me. Led Zepplin remasters? Same. And these are all artists whose music I love?!?!

However, I will happily listen to Aja, Led Zeppelin II, ChangesoneBowie or Songs in the Key of Life, Electric Ladyland over and over and over again.

Is it just me or is there something nostalgic, something more authentic, and something JUST RIGHT about the original albums, the original order of the tracks, the original way things were intended to be listened to?

Record company compilations of different artists are even worse. I get similarly excited buying a basket of jazz or blues tunes on the Verve label for example. But invariably, once I get past the slick repackaging, the high profile artists on the first or second track, I am deeply disappointed in the content and the rythmn and cadence of the content.

Obviously I am not so cynical to think that this might be a particularly high margin exercise to recycle old material by the record labels, but I just wondered if anyone else ever thought about this.
cwlondon

Showing 1 response by garfish

garfish
1,840 posts
 
Hi Cw; over the years I've certainly bought my share of "compilations"-- some good, and some not so. But when CD Recorders became readily available in the last few years, I started making my own compilations of individual artists/groups, but also of varied artists within a particular genre of music.

For example, I've done a 4 CD set I call "Blues & Soul, Nice and Slow". This set was made by selecting favorite songs from about 250-300 blues/soul CDs. I consider this a dynamite set and listen to it all the time. It took me over a month to select, volume match, and record the various tracks-- over 5 hours of excellent music.

After that success, a 4 CD set of "Blues & Rock, Nice & Hot", and 3 CD sets of "Country Angels", and of "Female Jazz Ballads". I did a "Best of Melissa Etheridge" that worked out especially well as her first 5 CDs are on the same label and sound like they were done in the same studio, and volume matching was easy. I've done many others too, but my point is that the CD Recorder has fundamentally changed the way I listen to music. Gotta' have the time to do it though-- and I do.

I'd also say that I don't buy fewer CDs either, in fact probably more-- then select those songs I like best and put them on my own CD-Rs in combinations I like, eg I've bought all of Allison Krause's CDs, and that's probably my next CD-R project. I've owned 4-5 different CD Recorders, and have finally settled on a Marantz CDR500 PRO. Just a different perspective on "compilations". Cheers. Craig
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