So the Vinyl Community on YouTube has a thread running — started by Chris on the Long Cut — that is the ten albums that they listen to the most. Not the ten favorite, not the ten best, and many comment on how they found it interesting that once they had a list it was not entirely their favorites or what they consider the best. I find these videos fascinating, have watched a number, and have already bought four albums based on the videos I have seen. (A little coincidence, as I found three of them at my favorite used store, but still.) I wanted to play along, but I do not have a YouTube channel so it's to the website. Nor do I have a vinyl collection, these are all CDs. I'm not sure if, in the end, that makes a difference as some people in the videos do fall back on CDs. Not everything can be had on vinyl, and the spirit of the game is really in what you listen to, not what you listen to it on. The only difference it will make is I will not much talk about the albums in terms of sides.
At first I held back because I thought it would be far too difficult an exercise. My CDs are in books (long ago I ran out of room to keep them in their cases), and, generally, if I open a book, I'll browse back and forth through it before I open another. So my listening habits are not jumping from book to book looking for specific albums. Plus, there is no way my poor memory would permit an exercise that went back too many years. But once I had a workable set of parameters, things suddenly became easy. Those parameters:
The albums listed will be:
(1) albums that, in browsing back and I forth, I always hit;
(2) albums that tend to get stuck in the CD player;
(3) limiting myself to the last three to five years.
People in the thread have to decide for themselves whether they will list ten most all time, or ten most in the last few years. I went with the latter.
With those parameters in hand I sat back and in no time had a list of six that I knew fit the mold. Then a sit down with my CDs and the list swelled to twenty-one; though, I knew I was intentionally being loose. It didn't take very much thought after that to have it ten. And once had, five — maybe six — of them I knew would probably be in the list were I to survey all of the last thirty years. I go back to them over and again. The other five — maybe four — are more time sensitive, either because I have only owned them the last couple of years, or if I go back in time there would be a different one by the same artist that would have been hogging the player.
