I had two early obsessions, and the first one to set in was music. My tastes have always been eclectic, occasionally bordering on omnivorous....and omnivourous is a very apt description if you look at my collection.
Really, just about everything. Rap is under- but not unrepresented. Classical was under-represented until I amalgamated Kayt's library. :) Heavy metal has dwindled into the background. Canadian acts are starting to show up more frequently (and more than just BNL and Alanis), and Brit-pop is making a strong showing.
I have the complete studio album libraries of Barenaked Ladies (well, major label, at least), Heart, Billy Joel, and "Weird Al" Yankovic. I have every Fleetwood Mac studio album since Stevie & Lindsey joined the band, plus Lindsey's studio albums, Stevie's box set, and—get this—John McVie's album! I have Abba's box set to make up for the fact that so many of their albums are out-of-print. (Speaking of out-of-print, the prized odd item in my collection is a CD burn of a open-reel recording of the LP of Born to Run Things by the MBA's. I'm still after Buckingham Nicks, and I only occasionally kick myself for not hitting up a then-girlfriend for a dub of BNL's Yellow Tape.)
I also just recently pondered the range of languages in my music collection, and it's almost a little staggering. In alphabetic order: Czech1, English, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hebrew2, Hindi3, Japanese, Italian2, Latin, Maori, Mock Swedish, Ojibwe3, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh1. I also think Hindi Ojibwe. I think Hebrew and Italian are represented, but I'm not sure. And, if you count spoken-word CDs, I can get Dutch in on a technicality.
1Okay, actually this one is only in the library by virtue of community property. :) It's Kayt's CD.
2I think I have this in the collection, but I'm not sure.
3I have a song that I think is in this language, but I can't confirm the identity of the language.
The latest addition to the library is: a tie, I bought Fleetwood Mac's Say You Will (Limited Edition) and Jimmy Buffett's Meet Me in Margaritaville the same day.
And here's what's in the changer in the car right now:
| 1 | (Empty, last occupied by December 2002 Road Mix) |
|---|---|
| 2 | September 2002 Road Mix |
| 3 | August 2002 Road Mix |
| 4 | (Empty, last occupied by Fleetwood Mac, Say You Will) |
| 5 | LiveonRelease, Seeing Red |
| 6 | (Empty, last occupied by February 2003 Road Mix) |
I started young with 45's and albums. When I was 10, I got a good tape deck and patch cords from the radio to it...and my collection grew in leaps and bounds, 90 minutes of cassette at a time. (I have always espoused the "three-song rule": any album that puts out three good songs, I buy. Make your own conclusions about how many more albums can meet that criteria now that you can find whole albums online. But I digress.) I moved on later to using my dad's old open-reel deck for the off-air tape making: tape from radio to open-reel, then edit to cassette. I also, for a while, taped the weekly disco show to videocassette, and then went through the whole show and saved the good stuff to cassette.
I stayed a vinyl snob until about 1986, and then I switched over almost entirely to CD. I became overwhelmed by CDs somewhere around 1996, when I took a part-time job at a chain music retailer. The employee discount can be a friend and an enabler. :) The final quantum leap my collection took was when Kayt and I consolidated libraries. Amazingly, while we have mostly compatible musical tastes, we had very few overlaps.