My Favorite Music: Series Introduction

Often when I’m listening to my music around friends, family, and peers I often get comments about how they like my music selection and usually wondering what I’m playing. While some of my music selection is easily recognizable, a lot of it is not. It would take a lot of time to write about specific albums as I have too much music and it would take forever. Instead I’m going to write a series of articles about my favorite artists and albums, breaking it down by music genres, at least the best I can by genre as there is a lot of my music collection that can be challenging to classify into a specific genre.

Life Filled With Music

As a child I vaguely remember growing up in a home where records, and possibly 8-tracks, were playing on our hi-fi stereo system, one of those giant furniture systems that would take up an entire wall in your parents living room. The music I remember from my early years was most likely a combined selection of my mom, Kaija, and my brothers, Antero and Timo music choices. I never recall my father Reijo being into music, he might have been, just not in my memories of him when I was a child.

What seems to heavily resonate with me and remind me of my childhood was a music selection from the 60’s and early 70’s containing of artists like Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra, Neil Young, and I suspect there had to be some Black Sabbath and Led Zepplin in there too as my teen years were heavily influenced by them. We even had The Animals and Iron Butterfly in our home as our mother was a photo journalist for magazines such as Life, but that was before my time, more my brothers time as they were in their mid-teens when I was born. I’m sure there was some more obscure stuff my brothers were playing, but I can’t seem to remember it.

Music has been a constant part of my life, I can’t think of a time when I’m not listening to music over the last 30+ years.

Throughout the years my music taste and choice has grown, only after 30 years do I feel that it has become varied and diverse with a lot of depth, yet still growing. I always try to keep an open mind with music while continuously listening for something new, be it newly released or put out over the last several decades. Good enjoyable music is good regardless of when it was put out.

My Music Library

These days I’ve ripped almost all of my CDs into iTunes, there are still a handful missing that I need to import. I tend to buy CD’s over digital downloads, I enjoy the CD as it’s something you can hold on to and look over the sleeve artwork, much like records back in the day, plus I like to listen to them in the car instead of using the iPod. I use my iPod when running and mountain biking. I used to have hundreds of records, but eventually I let go and sold most of them, however I could not let them all go, I still have about 50 or so records sitting in my bookshelf.

As of today, at least according to iTunes, it says my library has 42,580 songs, which is from 5,568 albums, by 2,666 artist, in over 200 genres, if I were to play my entire music library nonstop it would play for 128.2 days straight, and it is taking up 250.22 GB of storage space. Now granted I haven’t purchased all of those albums as I do share with my friends and they share with me, but I’ve probably purchased at least half of them.

42,580 songs, damn that’s a lot of music!

Now that doesn’t mean that all of those are my favorites, there is a good amount of average music in there too. Throughout the years I’ve learned that you have to give all music a chance to be heard to see if it is something that you will connect with and appreciate. Granted there will always be some songs and artists that just does not fit with us, after all music is personal and subjective to each person, there is plenty in there that I don’t go back and listen to very often.

Sharing My Favorite Music

The whole idea is to share great music, there are hundreds of thousands of artists out there and billions of songs in the world with new music being put out every second. It can be a constant challenge to discover great new music that you truly appreciate while still going back to your steady favorites. My list of favorites continues to grow each year, while some years I’m not finding a lot of great music, those years I tend to go bring in my older favorites into my regular rotation a lot more, then other years I’m discovering new favorites on a regular basis. It can vary by what you are able to discover and what mood you’re in.

How do I share my thoughts on my favorites out of that many songs, albums, and artists?

I’ve been thinking about this since I wrote my Top 10 Music Albums of 2011. How can I share all the amazing music that I consider to be my favorites? It’s a wonderful feeling when you discover music that ends up growing on you with each repeated listen, next thing you know it is heavily in your listening rotation and quickly becoming a favorite. There isn’t anything like it, and it’s unique for everyone. Music is like art, it’s all subjective and unique to each person, yet there are many commonalities within us that brings us together to appreciate and enjoy the music.

I figure the best way is to break it down into a handful of primary genres. At least that way I can get it into a manageable article without writing a whole book. So as time allows over the next several weeks I’ll be writing a series new articles as part of my Favorite Music Series where each one will cover a genre and share my thoughts on my favorite artists within that genre, and in my opinion, their best albums.

The genres will cover:

• Alternative
• Classic Rock
• Electronica
• Hard Rock
• Pop
• Rap/Hip Hop
• Reggae
• Rock
• Other

Hmm…what am I getting myself into here? This could take a good while before I get through all of it. Maybe I’ll have to limit it to the top 10 artists in each genre with some honorable mentions. We’ll see how it goes. Anyway, those are the main genres of music that I listen to regularly. If you appreciate good music, then check back regularly or subscribe to my feed below by email and you’ll get an email when I post new articles. In the mean time you can checkout my last.fm profile to hear what music I’ve been playing on my computers.

What do you think? What are your music habits like? Do you keep an ear out for new music or do you stick with the same favorites you’ve had for years? Please feel free to share your thoughts below and thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts.

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