I’m Aaron, a TV news producer and musician in Portland, Oregon.
This blog is a record of my attempt to listen to (almost) all the music from Tom Moon’s 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die: A Listener’s Life List. (Available at Powell’s Books and Amazon.com)
Since the book is organized alphabetically, my journey will be as well. I’ll do my best to listen to the recordings in order, although I might temporarily skip over some hard-to-find records while I track them down.
So why is this blog called 999 Recordings? Blame my wife. She points out that if I were to listen to all 1,000 recordings I need to hear before I die, I’ll likely get hit by a bus during the final measures of ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres. So no ZZ Top for me. My life as a music listener will remain incomplete so I can remain on the planet for as long as possible.
Sources & methods
I’m not an audiophile. I don’t own a record player. I listen to most music at home on a 2-channel Kenwood amplifier circa 1985, powering a couple of Pioneer speakers I picked up on sale at Circuit City. I listen on the road on a Sandisk Sansa Clip MP3 player, feeding a $15 set of Skullcrusher earbuds that do a decent job of blocking ambient noise on the light rail here in Portland.
I do have a set of small project studio monitors in the office upstairs that are especially harsh on heavily compressed music, so I’ll switch things up there on occasion.
Whenever possible, I’ll link to or embed the sources of the recordings as I post. This will mean a whole lot of listening on Last.fm and Rhapsody, which I subscribe to.
Purists will complain that I’m not getting the most out of the music by listening to a highly compressed internet stream. They’re absolutely right. But convenience wins, so I don’t want to hear your complaints.
Credits
Blog header photo by Vidiot, used under Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license.
