Importing Old Music

Saturday, December 12, 2009, at 04:12PM

By Eric Richardson

If you dig back through the 11 years of archives here (11 years!), you'll find a lot of posts where I wrote about music: what I was listening to, what shows I had seen, what I had rediscovered...

That last one seems to be a recurring trend for me. I have a song or an album and somehow it gets misplaced, but then I pull it out a few years later to realize I still think it's great.

I'm doing that right now, converting some albums I had sitting around as .ogg files. At the moment I'm being reminded how much I liked Massive Attack's Mezzanine, and a few minutes ago I was doing the same with Blonde Redhead's Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons.

Next up (and currently being converted to mp3 via Switch) is Tricky's Pre-Millennium Tension.

Maybe this isn't odd at all, but it surprises me how little my tastes have changed in the last ten years or so. I made a distinct switch in style right around 1998 / 1999, but it's been all the same stuff since then.

My music collection has also been primarily stored on the computer for ten years or so now, which at times has proved to be an all too fragile home. I still remember the surprise of firing up what should have been a dead drive in September of 2004 and finding a stash of songs I had thought were lost.

Misplacing albums does have its upside -- the recovery has all the fun of a iTunes shopping spree with none of the bill.