I traded tweets earlier today with a very cool graphic artist, Craig Robinson, author of the excellent and witty baseball infographic collection Flip Flop Fly Ball. The spur: he recently compiled his own single-disc version of the Beatles’ White Album, which reminded me of the time I did my version. We’re not the only ones, […]
posted 19 February 2013 in Archives, Links, Tasty Bits. 1 comment
This past weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of Guns N’ Roses’ messy yet magnificent magnum opus, Use Your Illusion. Honoring that occasion, the excellent Maura Johnston, music editor at the Village Voice, made herself a single-disc edit of the sprawling two-CD album–something I did for my own entertainment five years ago (although any honoring of […]
posted 19 September 2011 in Links, Tasty Bits. 2 comments
Much craziness this morning at Rule Forty-two World Headquarters, where we’re migrating all our files to our new computer and fighting off a nasty virus with nothing much more than hand-waving. So the next installment of the 1988 countdown will have to wait until Thursday. Until then, the final installment of my series of condensed […]
posted 16 September 2008 in Tasty Bits. 6 comments
(I’m on my way home from the Nevada desert today. Until I get back, here’s one more installment of my 2006 double-album series.) If not being able to edit an album down to a single vinyl disc of about 45 minutes is self-indulgent, then what’s not being able to able to edit down to a […]
posted 2 September 2008 in Tasty Bits. 8 comments
Wow, The River has a lot of filler. How much? If you pare away all the generic rockers (e.g. “I’m a Rocker”) and other dross on Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 double album, you have plenty of room left over for “Roulette,” a thundering track about a nuclear accident. (It was recorded during the River sessions but […]
posted 29 August 2008 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet
The conundrum for any music fan: would you rather have more songs from your favorite band on their new album, even if it meant the album wasn’t as good? Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin’s 1975 double disc, epitomizes that paradox. The great tracks are among the band’s very best, but they get a bit lost when […]
posted 27 August 2008 in Tasty Bits. 6 comments
Unforeseen side effects of the iPod: I probably couldn’t have put together Short Sharp Shocks without the help of iTunes breaking down my music library by length of song. And I wouldn’t have had the patience a couple of years ago to edit down classic double albums to single albums without being able to tinker […]
posted 25 August 2008 in Tasty Bits. 5 comments