Sunday, May 10, 2009

10,000 songs

Milestone alert: my iTunes odometer, if you will, just turned over its 10,000th song. Just as when my 1977 Datsun turned over 200,000 miles, I find myself taking a small bit of pride in what can almost be called a sort of accomplishment.

I mean, 10,000 songs is an awful lot of music, right? It's lmost 27 days of solid, continuous music in fact, which takes up 64.35 GB of space on my hard drive. So, yeah, a lot. And I've listened to 4,613 of those 10,000 songs more than once, 2,962 more than twice, 1,365 more than five times, 611 more than 10 times and 95 more than 20 times.

The time frame on this is obviously artificial. I purchased my new Macbook on March 1, 2008 and began restructuring my music collection fully in the digital realm. So that's the zero hour, when all my music got recalibrated back to the start. I've ripped nearly my entire CD collection by now - I've just been slow to close out one last stack of burned discs that really aren't too important to me.

I ripped and played my favorite album first - Dylan's Blood on the Tracks - and just as much as I've embraced new music over the past 14 months, I've also dug pretty deep into the realm of forgotten favorites.

So what is this song that's become No. 10,000 in my 14 months of creating and listening to this new digital library of music?

The 10,000th song is "Smile Upon Me," by Passion Pit, from the 2008 album Chunk of Change, a recent recommendation from my good friend Mr. Chair. And because his description is priceless, I'll quote it wholesale: "A DYI EP that's kind of like The Format if they were on coke and covered in glitter. The hottest shit I heard in a while." And Mr. Chair is spot on here - Chunk of Change is poppy and dancy, with a bit of electronica thrown in, but not at the expense of the hooks. I'm digging the EP - it's providing a nice counter to this lazy Sunday. And I'll have to check out Passion Pit's new album when it comes out later this month.

DOWNLOAD:
Passion Pit - Sleepyhead
(which is now the 10,004th song I've played on my iTunes)

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