Listamania

Everyone’s making lists. It’s the end of the year; it’s the end of the decade; it’s time for a good list. I used to love making year-end album lists. I’d spend time pouring through my iTunes library, finding all the albums that I loved from that year. The obvious, the less obvious. I’d keep a running list of candidates during the year. And ten? How could I narrow it down to just ten albums. There would need to be a bunch of runners up. Ones that just barely missed the cut.

No more.

Somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to force everything into this form. Sure, a list of my Top 10 albums of 2006 may be a good historical checkpoint for what I was listening to at the time, but not for much else. Do I even listen to half of them anymore? Lately I’ve been more drawn to fewer works that I really love. Ones that five or ten years from now I’ll still be excited to hear. I’d rather look back at 2009 and remember a handful of music that stuck with me, than see a list of albums that I haven’t listened to in ages.¹

This all became crystalized for me when I starting thinking about it in the same way that I’ve been thinking about photography lately. I take a lot of photos over the course of a year. Not nearly as many as some, but more than the average. Whenever I’m taking photos—whether it’s a concert, or a trip, or a walk through the woods—I may take hundreds at a time. I spend a lot of time reviewing them, and editing them, and thinking about them. And you know what? If I take a few hundred photos wandering around the streets of New York and I’m left with one that I’m really happy with, I’m good with that. Shit, if I really like the photo I’m thrilled.

I store all of my photos sorted by month, with individual project folders for each event during that month. When I’m in the middle of July and running around and filling up project after project with images it’s hard to have perspective on anything outside of what’s in front of me. But when I go back in December and flip though those same photos, I don’t care about the fifty photos of the bird on the beach. Hopefully there’s one or two that stand out. I’ll walk away with those.

I always hope that (almost) any photo I post online evokes some sort of response. Not necessarily words or feelings, but something. I want it to grab me first in some way, and if it does for someone else, great. If not, it probably means something to me anyways. If I can look back at the end of the year and see a few things that say something, that carries me. That lasts.

That’s where I’m at with music these days. I listen to a lot of music. It’s all around me all the time, and a lot of it’s very good. But at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of the decade, if I’m left with a handful of music that really means something to me—that really grabs me—that’s what I’m going to take away.

It’s easy to take a lot of photos and it’s easy to listen to a lot of good music, but it’s hard to find something that really grabs you. But I keep listening, and I keep shooting.

¹ All of this is no knock on anyone else. I read, and get a lot of enjoyment out of, a lot of other people’s wrap-ups. It’s more a reflection on a shift that I’m personally going through than anything else.