Seeping Matter

Call me a humbug but I have a hard time getting into a lot of holiday music.  Some holiday songs, like “O Holy Night,” I absolutely love and would enjoy them any time of the year.  But some of the other stuff I have a hard time with and it usually takes me clear until about Christmastime until I’m feeling it; of course, by then it is about time to put the Christmas music away for another 11 months.

I tried to remedy this problem one year by buying Twisted Sister’s “A Twisted Christmas” album, but it honestly didn’t help much.  Frankly this album sounds like something they just threw together one afternoon, much like most other Christmas albums.

Some holiday songs sound like they were recorded after a few too many mugs of adult-style eggnog.  For example, I wouldn’t want the guy who sings “It’s A Marshmallow World” driving me home after a Christmas party:

Izzza marshmallow worl dinna winner,
Wenda sno comesta cubuda groun,
uh, duh duh day, blah blah blah blah ay,
I wayfer idda holear roun!

Some make sense for us Mormons but not so much for others.  One is “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” clearly written to be sung at tithing settlement which occurs at the end of the year at Christmastime:

Good tithings we bring to you and your kin,
Good tithings for Christmas and a happy new year!

Here, “kin” pretty obviously means “counselors” and possibly also “financial clerk.”

This is also the song my sister infamously sung at high volume in my father’s ear all the way home from Heber one Christmas season, in the following completely ironic manner:

WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
AND A HAPPY NEW EAR!!!!!

Some songs simply don’t make any sense to me at all, like this one (as best I can tell these lyrics are correct):

Frosting the snowman is a jolly happy goal,

But the plain fact is the stuff won’t stick, and your snowman will just fall apart anyway if you try it, and it really doesn’t taste that good anyway, because if your snowman is anything like mine there’s a bunch of sticks and grass packed into the snow anyway, so there’s really no point in it.

Perhaps the best example I can think of this is the holiday classic “All The Dang Signs.”  They sing this all the time at New Years and even at the end of that holiday classic (and one of my favorite movies), “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  But nobody really knows the lyrics, which go like this:

Should all the quaintens be for naught
And never brought to mines?
Should all the quaintens be for naught
And all the dang signs?
Yes all the dang signs, my friend,
For all the dang signs,
We’ll spend a cup and kind of cheer
For all the dang signs.

Anyway, happy and prosperous 2012 everyone.

Some time ago at work, breakroom talk with a friend led to a discussion about Auto-Tune, a technology I oddly had never heard of before but had suspected for some time.  Auto-Tune is a pitch-correcting technology used to analyze and correct the pitch of a tone that would otherwise be considered off-key.  From what I’ve read, it can be used in recordings to add an obvious digitized effect to vocals (think Cher’s “Believe” as an example), but can also be applied more subtly such that it might not really be noticed (minor pitch correction in a live performance, for example).

This is something that at first glance seems like a great idea.  I mean, why not use Auto-Tune all the time?  That way you can ensure that your vocal performances are spot-on perfect all the time.

I thought about this for a while and wondered if this would really be such a good idea.  With this in mind, I started paying closer attention to music as I was listening to it and started noticing the vocals.  I’d ask myself, “Does this artist sing on tune all the time?  If Auto-Tune were applied to this vocalist would he/she sound different?”

The most important question was the follow-on:  “Would the application of Auto-Tune to this vocalist improve the song or have the opposite effect?”

Here’s some artists that I thought would probably sound quite a bit different with Auto-Tune used:

• Brian Johnson (AC/DC)
• David Lee Roth (Van Halen)
• Bono (U2)
• Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden)
• Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam)
• Bob Marley
• Dave Mustaine (Megadeth)
• Geddy Lee (Rush)
• Axl Rose (Guns N’ Roses)
• Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin)
• Joe Elliott (Def Leppard)
• Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)

You’ll notice that these are among the most influential musical artists of the past 40 or so years of rock music.  If you are familiar with the artists, think about the music they make and the sound of the vocals.  Try to imagine what those vocals would sound like if they were sung with a perfectly clear voice that is always on-key.

I think you would agree with me that using Auto-Tune on the vocals for these artists would have completely ruined their signature sound.  U2′s “With or Without You” wouldn’t have sounded so yearningly desperate if Bono had been precisely on tune the whole time.  The vocals may have been technically perfect, but it would have completely ruined the song.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the imperfect vocals of these artists is part of what makes them special.

Can you imagine if instead these bands had been formed by an executive committee of businesspeople?  Can you imagine if every recording had to be approved by this committee?  “Mr. Vedder, you are still not 100% on-key during the chorus of ‘Evenflow.’  I know you are trying to sing that with emotion, but we need you to do that on-key.  If you cannot do that, we’re going to have to find someone else who can.”  And then you’d have Pearl Jam without Eddie Vedder, which would be … what exactly?  Anything noteworthy at all?

The application of Auto-Tune to “improve” vocal performance is simply one example of something we see so much lately in America.  We have this belief that there is a clear definition of what “excellence” is in any particular realm, and that anything failing to meet that definition is substandard.  When it comes to vocals, for example, singing perfectly on pitch meets that definition; anything else would fail to meet the definition.  What we miss here is that doing this also has the effect of causing everything to be the same.  Auto-Tune may correct pitch, but it also has the effect of removing some of the distinction from the way I would sing (which isn’t good, by the way).

Look through the examples again and I think you will agree that there is value in the distinction and the uniqueness.

Another example of this is in contemporary corporate-America’s valuation of “diversity.”  Modern companies, especially big ones, make a big deal about valuing diversity, but this mostly has to do with avoiding discrimination:  Valuing older and younger employees equally, valuing women and men equally, valuing different races equally, etc.  But what it really means to value diversity is to value the things that make people unique and therefore give them unique value.  If you don’t like Iron Maiden that’s fine, but to dislike Iron Maiden because of the way Bruce Dickinson sings is missing the point.  That’s like saying you would like chocolate chip cookies if they didn’t have chocolate chips in them.  Without chocolate chips, they may still be tasty, but they certainly aren’t chocolate chip cookies.  It wouldn’t make sense to say you value the unique sound of Iron Maiden while simultaneously trying to get Bruce Dickinson to change how he sings, just as it doesn’t make sense to say you value the unique talents and contributions I bring while simultaneously pushing me to change to become like everyone else.

Everyone has unique value, unique talents, unique abilities that set them apart from everyone else.  People naturally try to make order and sense in the world by understanding and categorizing things.  The effect of this is that society is always trying to tell you to suppress your unique value and conform.  “Don’t sing like Brian Johnson,” they’d say.  “He sings terribly and he’ll never be successful that way.  If you can’t sing with feeling and also sing on key, you need to learn to suppress the emotion because people like their music to be on key.”

All evidence to the contrary.

I’ll sum it up with this video featuring Steve Vai.  Steve Vai is a guitar virtuoso and one of my guitar heroes.  Vai’s style is not exactly traditional and so he’s not so popular as, say, Eddie Van Halen.  Steve Vai could have modified his style some 25 years ago when he was playing with David Lee Roth or Whitesnake to try to make himself more mainstream and thus more palatable an artist.  But doing so would have also made him not become the marvel that Steve Vai is today.  Instead, he remained true to himself and became a truly unique, fascinating, and marvelous guitar virtuoso, and his impact on music and the music industry is certainly much greater than it would have been otherwise.

My favorite quote from the video:  “I have strengths, and I have weaknesses.  I don’t work on my weaknesses.  I ignore them, and I cultivate my strengths.”

Enjoy.

Jenny Kulland just permanently un-friended me on Facebook.

Recently in The Register, Jon Bon Jovi was quoted in an interview saying, “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”  The quote immediately reeks of the same stuff as the other spewage common of 70′s and 80′s era artists who are still around today.

Reading further into the article is advised so you won’t hate on Jon Bon too much.  The experience he’s really talking about here is that of a teenage kid traipsing down to the music store, dropping their hard-earned cash (at minimum wage, likely) on an album where they’ve only heard one song, or maybe none at all, then taking it home and experiencing the whole thing from end to end as an atomic unit.

It’s a story I’m very familiar with.  I don’t even want to think about how much money I blew on music in high school.  Today, when I listen to my old music, I insist on listening to it in album order, almost all the time.  I can see Jonny Boy’s point here — even if you are paying for the music, there’s something from the experience that is lost by not experiencing the album as it was conceptualized by the artists who created it.  I remember the first time I heard Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” album, cover to cover, at a friend’s house, when it was brand new.  There’s something about the album as a whole, the way the songs are sequenced, that makes it better as a unit than the sum of the parts.  My first comment to my friend was, “That album is going to be a classic.”  Sure enough, over 20 years later I still listen to it all the time.

It isn’t that JBJ is wrong about what the experience has lost.  It’s that his blame is misplaced.  It isn’t Steve Jobs’ fault.  It is the music industry’s fault.

Back in the late 70′s to about the mid 80′s, bands formed organically.  Guys (girls too, sometimes) like Eddie Van Halen would spend every waking moment teaching themselves to play their brother’s electric guitar while he was delivering newspapers.  They would form garage bands, then the more serious of them would form backyard party bands, and maybe start performing on the Sunset Strip, where one night Gene Simmons or someone like that might be in the audience and would offer to help them get recorded.  They would scrounge all the money together they could and record an album.  They’d send it off to a label who would agree to distribute it.  Only after an album was successful (or sometimes more than one) would they get a contract with a label.  All this time they’d written their own songs, often for years before they ever performed at the Whiskey A Go-Go.  They already knew which ones were popular, which ones sounded right, before they ever stepped into the studio.

Sometime in the 80′s, someone had a boneheaded idea:  ”Hey, why require artists to actually go through all of that?  We could short-circuit the whole process by hiring songwriters, hiring studio musicians to record, and holding auditions for attractive people who know how to sing!”  Before you knew it, people who had not gone through the wringer were getting record deals too.  But since the “artists” weren’t doing all the work anymore, the labels were keeping all the money and writing entirely self-serving contracts.  This made things that much worse for the organic bands, who didn’t deserve to be treated like their music-of-mass-production counterparts.

Before long, you had entire albums filled up mostly with filler garbage but featuring a couple of popular singles.  People would go purchase the album, as Bon Jovi described above, but be pretty disappointed with the album as a whole even if they liked the singles okay.  In addition, they found that even though the singles were catchy enough to get them to buy the album, they lacked substance and got old quickly.

In other words, there was a clear shift from albums as a collection of art to albums as an assemblage of mostly trash with some items disguised as art, but lacking in the depth and substance to truly become art.  Yet the music industry was charging just as much for these new-age albums as they used to charge for the classics-in-infancy.

It was around this time, the late 80′s into the 90′s, where I and most of my friends began saying, “I sure wish there was a way to just pay for the songs I want.”

So, Jon, don’t blame Steve Jobs.  If you want to blame someone, blame Tiffany.  She’s one of the first I remember that followed this formula which ultimately doomed the rest of you.

Dave, Brandon, Greg, Dallin, and I saw The Scorpions the other night on what has been billed as their farewell tour.  Which means we will never see them again.  Ever.

(Moment of silence)

It was an excellent show.  Those guys are some pretty bad dudes and can still rock at 60+ years old (!).  Also, they are by far the best heavy metal band who regularly pronounces the word “way” as “wee” and gets away with it.  Examples:

• “I realize I missed a day, but I’m too wrecked to care anywee” (Blackout)
• “Where the children of tomorrow dream awee in the wind of change” (Wind of Change)
• “Love, our love just shouldn’t be thrown awee” (Still Loving You)
• “Baby our love will find a wee as long as we believe in love” (Believe In Love)

And of course, the prime example:

• “You better get out of their wee-eee-eee, wee-eee-eee, wee-eee-eee, get out of their wee!” (Bad Boys Running Wild)

Tesla 2010

Tesla opened for the Scorps.  Actually, Jackyl opened for both of them with a very forgettable performance.  All I remember from them is that the lead singer cut the seat of a stool in half with a chainsaw and it still took him four tries to break the stool.  Or was it five?  Who opened for Tesla and Scorpions again?  See, I said it was forgettable.

I guess that’s unfair. They did have some fans. See the big guy standing up on the right? The guy that was standing up the entire show? Who would basically just jump around and make those devil-horn signs with his hands all night? He seemed to like them. I also think he might have been on crystal meth, but that’s a different story.

Anyway, Tesla put on a great show and sounded really awesome.  I wish they would have played longer, but hey, they had to make time for, whatever that band was that came before.  Modern Day Cowboy was especially excellent.

But, of course, we were all there to see The Scorpions one last time.  They were outstanding.  Not the best concert I’ve been to, but top honors in my list are currently co-held by some pretty stiff competition.

Scorpions 2010

Here’s the setlist, borrowed from the review written by a friend of a friend at the local paper:

• Main Set:
  • Sting in the Tail
  • Make It Real
  • Bad Boys Running Wild
  • The Zoo
  • Coast to Coast
  • Loving You Sunday Morning
  • The Best is Yet to Come
  • Wind of Change
  • Raised on Rock
  • Tease Me Please Me
  • Another Piece of Meat
  • Dynamite
  • Kottak Attack (Drum Solo)
  • Blackout
  • Big City Nights
• Encore:
  • No One Like You
  • Rock You Like a Hurricane

So, it was a pretty good set, but they missed a lot of songs.  Here are some of the songs they forgot to play:

• Holiday
• Don’t Make No Promises
• Falling In Love
• Can’t Live Without You
• Arizona
• China White
• Coming Home
• Still Loving You
• Don’t Stop at the Top
• Passion Rules the Game
• Believe In Love
• Crazy World
• Send Me An Angel
• Alien Nation
• Wild Child
• Turn You On
• Lorelei

See, that’s only another 17 songs, which would have put the running time at about three hours, which seems about right.  My voice wouldn’t have lasted that long, or my hearing, but what the heck.  It’s their last tour, after all.

I guess the reason I get so melancholy and nostalgic about this stuff is that nobody is replacing them.  Van Halen, Def Leppard, Journey, and now the Scorps — all these bands are either mostly or completely gone now.  All that great music they wrote.  There are no good new bands filling in, nobody writing good new music to take up the mantle of these iconic hard rock bands from the 80′s.

Lucky for me, the good bands from days past wrote enough great music that it should get me through the rest of my life.  Hopefully.

Rudolf, Klaus, Mattias, and company:  Thanks for the memories.  We will miss you.

Well folks, that day finally came:  I’ve finished the experiment.  18 1/2 months and some 10000 songs later, I’ve completed a journey that started out as a whim, to listen to every single song in my collection in alphabetic order (according to iTunes).

This also means the Facebook contest is officially over.  Here’s the results of the contest:

• First  Winner: Angie Newman Hull (Drowning Pool)
• Last Winner: Jason Chappell (ZZ Top)
• Most Wins: Jenny Kulland (9)
• Total Unique Winners: 16
• Total Rounds Won: 41
• Total Rounds: 320-ish
• Winner Details:
  • Jenny Kulland, 9 wins (Quiet Riot, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Savage Garden, Seal, Spin Doctors, Supertramp, Tesla, 3 Doors Down, Violent Femmes)
  • Tonia Snow Fraser, 6 wins (Queensrÿche, Theory of a Deadman, Toto, Trapt, Twisted Sister, U2)
  • Pammy Cochran, 5 wins (Genesis, Kansas, KISS, Live, Nirvana)
  • Tad Thorley, 5 wins (Erasure, Europe, Faith No More, Hurricane, Iron Maiden)
  • Jason Chappell, 3 wins (REO Speedwagon, Rush, ZZ Top)
  • Alison Tate, 2 wins (Megadeth, The Who)
  • Mike Moore, 2 wins (Foreigner, Whitesnake)
  • Angie Newman Hull, 1 win (Drowning Pool)
  • Bret Dayley, 1 win (Foghat)
  • Curtis Meek, 1 win (Stevie Ray Vaughan)
  • Jaci Ashdown, 1 win (Stone Temple Pilots)
  • Jeff Carroll, 1 win (Mötley Crüe)
  • Jeremy Stanley, 1 win (Guns ‘N Roses)
  • Justin Dye, 1 win (Faster Pussycat)
  • Ruth Jex, 1 win (Huey Lewis)
  • Alen Peacock, 1 win (Paul Oakenfold – this seems suspicious though)

That last one I’m not sure about.  Alen pretty much always guessed Barry Manilow so I don’t know how it could be that he guessed correctly.  It was almost definitely on accident.

By the way, it should be noted that Jenny only started playing somewhere around P or Q.  Who knows how many she might have won if she’d joined Facebook earlier!

In seriousness, I’m surprised at how pleased I am that I did this.  It didn’t give me a new outlook on life or anything, but it was certainly more interesting than I thought.  Here’s some of the key insights I got from this experiment.

Really Great Music Is Rare

There’s lots of music out there, but finding truly great music is difficult.  It’s why we cherish our favorite bands so much.  If just anyone could create good music, we would all have 50 favorite bands.

I recall some time ago reading an interview with Eddie Van Halen in a magazine where he discussed this.  I don’t remember exactly what the full context was, but it probably had something to do with a discussion of his incredible guitar playing ability.  Then he said something like this:  “Writing a really good song is incredibly difficult.  It isn’t hard to write a song, but to write a song that appeals to people is hard.  Writing a song that appeals to a wide audience and can endure for generations?  Very hard.”  I’m definitely paraphrasing, but I really liked the point he was making:  As good as he is at playing music, he wanted to point out how much more talent it takes to create music.

This is why I say he’s the best guitarist of our generation.  Satriani, Vai, SRV, Petrucci, Malmsteen, Eric Johnson, and a host of others have incredible guitar talent, but how many of those have that level of talent AND have also been able to write so many incredible songs?  Like I said, there’s a lot of music to choose from, but it is a treat to find really good music because it isn’t that easy to do.

Really Great Music Is Becoming Harder To Find

Ironically, it seems that today there is more music than ever, and yet there is less quality in the music of today, overall, than in the past.  For example, as I was listening to Staind’s covers of “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains and “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd, all I could think of was how much I wished I was listening to Alice in Chains or Pink Floyd instead.  When I start thinking of really great artists, artists that write really great music, I start thinking of groups like Alice in Chains, Journey, New Order, Pink Floyd, U2, Van Halen, Rush, Collective Soul, REM, Coldplay, Led Zeppelin, and Stone Temple Pilots.  I know many of you are going to say that most of those are bands I grew up with, and that is true.  But consider the set.  There’s bands from the 70′s, 80′s, and 90′s in there, and music of a variety of genres.  But this set is definitely skewed toward the pre-21st century era.  I’ve got a lot of music in my collection that is recent (within 10 years), but there’s not a lot in that category that I think is all that interesting.

Even for bands that have older albums that I like, their newer stuff is completely forgettable.  Metallica and Mötley Crüe are perfect examples of this:  Great stuff from the 80s, but when it comes to the most recent stuff they have to offer, I feel like asking for that portion of my life back.

The music industry laments the fact that people are sharing MP3s among each other and downloading them from the internet for free (for the record, I do not do this).  Maybe it is time they quit blaming society and start taking a look at themselves.  Have they ever considered that the market is simply expressing the general sentiment of value for the music being offered today?

I Did Find Some New Favorite Bands

There weren’t many of these, but I did end up finding a much greater appreciation for some bands that I only previously sort-of liked or was only somewhat familiar with.  Included in this list are:

• Coldplay
• Foo Fighters
• Iron Maiden
• Nirvana
• Soundgarden
• Train
• Weezer

Some Obscure Rock Bands Are Really Great

As I was saying before, today it seems that just about any group of people can put a band together and get signed by a major label.  This was not the case when I grew up, when rock was at its best.  As a result, there were a number of great rock bands that are mostly unknown, but worth finding if you can.  In this list are:

• Kane Roberts
• Lillian Axe
• Mr. Big
• MSG
• Roxy Blue
• Saints and Sinners (possibly simultaneously the best and most obscure)
• Steelheart
• Y&T

Do Not Judge An Album By Its Cover Art

I once thought of doing a whole post on this, and thought better of it because I would probably regret having the pictures in my blog postings.  So I’m going to write about it now, but no pictures.  Anyway, the key learning here is this:  There is no demonstrable correlation between having an attractive woman on the album cover art and having great music in the album itself.

I conducted a very scientific study, wherein I made a list of all the albums in my collection and then hired someone from western China via eLance.com to rate all the album art according to the following scale:

• Cool
• Lame
• Has an attractive woman

Thus we see here, demonstrably, that having an attractive woman on the cover is merely another bit of information and has nothing to do with whether the art is “cool” or “lame”; rather, it means the most immediately apparent feature of the album art was this, and not the coolness or lameness of the album art.

Using this information I then rated all of my music where the album was categorized (not by me, remember) in the third category above.  Then I averaged the rankings of all those albums.

The results of my very scientific study are clear:  The average ranking was 2.75, which is somewhere in between “Meh” and “Okay”.  Not “Horrible” (level 0), but not “Awesome” either (level 5).

Takeaways

So, all in all, it was an excellent experiment and a totally fun contest, at least for me.  Here’s the key takeaways:

• Jenny Kulland either has great taste in music, is clairvoyant, or is a cheater (depending on who you ask)
• Alen Peacock still doesn’t understand alphabetical order
• There’s some really great music out there and it is worth finding, BUT
• Most music these days is really lame, and the lameness seems skewed toward modern music
• The album art offers no indication to you of the quality of the album’s music

Sigh.  Now what am I going to do?

I find I listen to a lot more music when I’m heads-down in my office every day trying to deliver a product instead of spending most of the day in meetings.

Weird, but true.

So here’s where we are today:

Current Standings:

• Current artist/album/song: Weezer/Blue Album/Say It Ain’t So
• Songs listened to:9934
• Total Songs: 10510
• Percentage Complete: 94.52%
• Estimated Completion: May 2010

May 2010.  May 2010.  May 2010.  That is next month, my friends.

Surely many of you will be relieved.  These are the people who comment on my status updates saying, “What?” or “I don’t understand what you are talking about,” or “Barry Manilow,” or who have blocked my facebook status updates because they are so sick of hearing what band I’m listening to now.

Yet, there are surely others of you who will be sad to hear this, because you love my facebook contest so and you are just now getting into it.  Well, to you guys I wish to simply say, “Suck it up.”  I have no plans to do this again.

I listened to over 1000 songs this past month.  Of course, in the past month I’ve also put in 5 weeks of time in a 4 week period due to my own ignorance.  Still, with about 600 songs remaining, odds are pretty good I’ll wrap this up in the next month.  Things to look forward to include everyone’s favorite funny cover band, a classic rock band, the best heavy metal band you never heard of (well, with the possible exception of Saints & Sinners), a guitar virtuoso, another heavy metal band that is a favorite of Beavis & Butthead, and some dudes with really long beards.

Image credit: amazon.com

This announcement for the 2010 World Superbike USA weekend, to be formal, sounds freaking awesome.  Part of the announcement describes a concert that is included with the ticket price, featuring Foreigner, Styx, Kansas, and “a possible surprise addition to be named later.”

So obviously there will definitely be another band that is even more awesome than those three, as hard as that is to believe.

Derrick and I already have our weekend tickets, so now we are speculating who the fourth band will be.  The key traits for selection are:

• Awesomeness
• I like them
• I want them to come
• Pure awesomeness

Here are the top five obvious and likely candidates:

• Def Leppard — Def Leppard has toured with Styx and Foreigner within the past few years so they are a strong candidate to come again.  And they are awesome.
• Journey — Journey has also toured with Styx, in particular, in the past.  Plus they are awesome.
• Rush — Rush, pretty much the only good Canadian export, got snubbed by Canada when they didn’t get invited to perform at the Olympics.  Also, awesome.
• Van Halen — I haven’t seen Van Halen since 2007.  And even back then they didn’t come to Utah.  They probably feel bad about this and so are planning to come for World Superbike.  And awesome.
• Pink Floyd — The most likely candidate, both due to awesomeness and due to not having performed for like 15 years.  Also, they are from Europe which means that, unlike you, they’ve actually heard of World Superbike.

It’s unlikely that all five of these bands will come, but hey, you never know.

It doesn’t seem like it has been this long, but it is definitely time for another update.

Current Standings:

• Current artist/album/song: Styx/Return to Paradise/Blue Collar Man
• Songs listened to: 8914
• Total Songs: 10504
• Percentage Complete: 84.86%
• Estimated Completion: June 2010

Still estimating a completion time of June.  Can I bring this in at all?  That all depends on how much time I’m allowed to spend in my office.

The past month has been mostly excellent, highlighted by Stone Temple Pilots and Styx of course.  I did get that movie-only heavy metal band in there, Steel Dragon.  What?  You thought it would be Spinal Tap?  Yeah, a lot of you thought that.

The Ts have a lot of unknown quantities in them, but Tool is definitely one I’m looking forward to.  With luck we could get clear through the Ts before the next update.

By the way, some of you are having trouble remembering the rules, which are posted here.  And some of you are having trouble understanding alphabetical order, which is basically explained here.  Although the ordering is, strictly speaking, iTunes alphabetical order, which may or may not conform with true alphabetical order.  Blame Steve.

Image credit: amazon.com

I’m a little late with February’s update.  I know many of you have been bothered and concerned by this.  Fear not, better late than never, and other trite phrases.

Current Standings:

• Current artist/album/song: Soundgarden/Superunknown/Spoonman
• Songs listened to: 8524
• Total Songs: 10597
• Percentage Complete: 80.44%
• Estimated Completion: June 2010

Still looking at a June completion.  But suddenly this doesn’t seem so far away anymore.

Scorpions and Soundgarden were the definite highlights of February.  Slaughter was a fun surprise, not that I hadn’t heard them before, I just forgot how much fun they are.  The music quality is pretty trivial though.  Seether was also in there, but that band isn’t really doing it for me anymore.  Seal was also a very refreshing change.

What does the next month hold?  A classic rock band, a classic grunge band, an excellent guitar virtuoso or two, and a heavy metal band so obscure they weren’t even real, except in a movie.  And a lot of modern stuff that is probably not very good.  We’ll see though.

Image credit: amazon.com

Update time. Here’s where we are now:

Current Standings:

• Current artist/album/song: Scorpions/Blackout/Dynamite
• Songs listened to: 8020
• Total Songs: 10563
• Percentage Complete: 75.93%
• Estimated Completion: June 2010

The completion date moved out another month again. Hrrrm…

I’ve just started into Scorpions now, which is pretty good.  Sammy Hagar was enjoyable this month as was Sarah McLachlan.  Saving Abel was one I was interested to hear, but it is pretty much just meh.

My normal pace is about 700 songs/month, but this past month it’s been more like 400.  Assuming the standard 700 songs/month pace, we should get as far as Sting this month.  The stuff in between is pretty varied.  Nothing’s exactly got me excited, but it shouldn’t be too bad either.