I want to avoid going through my whole collection and ripping the CDs in the order they are stored on my bookshelves. This does make packing the discs away a little tricky after I rip them, but it also gives me a wonderful randomness to this whole process. To make things a little more random, I went into the extra bedroom this morning at asked Celia and Mira to pull a few discs off the shelves. Celia went for some red spines (ABBA and Air), and Mira just went to the shelves and started to pull discs down. Whether or not Mira did this in response to my request isn’t known – this is what Mira does when she is around the CD shelves. Today, Mira grabbed off the The Smiths and Elliott Smith. R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic For The People’ was just above those and fell down with the ‘Smiths’, and I also grabbed ‘Marriage Of Figaro’.

I got ABBA for Tamiko some time ago (a download that I burned to disc), and I admit they are quite a guilty pleasure. It’s hard not to have fun when ABBA is playing. I remember listening to ABBA in spanish class in high school (ABBA Oro), and I love to hear Tamiko sing along with them. Celia loves to dance to them (and she loves to dance to Kylie Minogue, who I am sure would not be who she is without ABBA). And as Mira gets her feet under her, I imagine she’ll enjoy them too. What a stark contrast their music is to Elliott Smith’s. The two discs I ripped today were his first album (fairly dark, just Elliott and his guitar) and ‘From A Basement On A Hill’ (released after his suicide). His first album is a wonderful, moody record, and in hindsight probably hints at what will happen in his future. ‘From A Basement On A Hill’ is simply to sad for me to listen to. I have never even listened to the whole thing. When I first bought it, I got about halfway through it before I turned it off. It was just too sad for me at the time, and I have never brought myself to listen to the whole thing. The unfinished quality of what I remember hearing was quite fitting.

The Smith’s ‘The Queen Is Dead’ and R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic for the People’ both bring along lots of high school memories. Heavier on the R.E.M. side though. Not that I don’t appreciate The Smiths, but I was always more of an R.E.M. fan. And while I really got into R.E.M. with ‘Document’ and ‘Green’, ‘Automatic For The People’ was one of my favorite albums of theirs at the time it came out. I understand why it didn’t catch the ears of a lot of other R.E.M. fans, but the more acoustic, orchestrated feel of this album spoke to me at the time. A couple of weeks ago ‘Monty Got A Raw Deal’ was featured in an NPR interview about songs and game shows. And hearing only 30 seconds of the song left me wanting to hear the whole album again. ‘Man On The Moon’ doesn’t stand up as well for me now (a casualty of radio overplay) but ‘Try Not To Breathe’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’ strike me as even more amazing the I remember. And the strings in ‘Drive’ still sound unexpected to me… fresh and dark at the same time.

‘Marriage Of Figaro’ is one of my favorite operas. But over the past couple of years, I have started to feel it is just wrong to only listen to opera. It is such a visual and dramatic medium that so much is lost when you only hear it. A couple years ago I thought I would eventually want to replace all my opera recordings with DVDs, but when I finished transferring the disc today I played a few tracks (as part of my streaming test). And it is so amazing to hear this music. Sure, the visuals and staging are missing, but a Mozart aria has no problem standing on its own. The recording is a live one (with John Eliot Gardiner conducting, Bryn Terfel and Alison Hagley). I watched the video a couple of times during shifts in the video store at Tower, and it is an amazing performance. Gardiner shapes an amazing performance, and the sound quality is stunning. I look forward to listening to the whole thing again very soon.