So I am going to share with you the facebook meme brought to me by Bell’s Knits.
The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
1. Rio – Duran Duran
2. Mercy Seat – Nick Cave
3. The White Stripes – The White Stripes
4. Eponymous – R.E.M.
5 . Epic – Faith No More
6. Nevermind – Nirvana
7. Pablo Honey – Radiohead
8. Hazards of Love – The Decemberists
9. Somery – The Descendents
10. Tommy – The Wedding Present
11. Shame About Ray – the Lemonheads
12. Slanted and Enchanted – Pavement
13. Is This It – The Strokes
14. Flood – They Might Be Giants
15. Bleach – Nirvana
Wow, doing that it shows how much I tend to think about songs individually rather than albums. The iPod age means I rarely seem to listen to entire albums at a time, just snatches here and there. Perhaps this is revealed by the fact that not that many of those albums are from the last 10 years, and fewer from the last 10. It is interesting that our conception of music has moved away from the album thing which probably reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s, but has died away now that cd shuffle and iPods and our other technologies of music have moved beyond the mix tape – we no longer have to listen to music in the manner in which artists carefully construct it for us.Oh, how could I have forgotten Pink Floyd and Dark Side of the Moon for that list? But I think of it now because its tracks always sound oddly out of place when they randomly show up on my iPod. But then again, so do some of those by Eminem or OutKast – so maybe album construction isn’t totally dead.
All right, those of you who read this – I challenge you to construct your own and link back here – then I will return the favour by linking to you.
Godard's Letterboxes 
My list was deliberately a bit older because I always think newish albums haven’t be around long enough to really stand up to a test like this.
But I agree – shuffle functions do change how we listen although with long held favourite artists I still try to listen to whole albums periodically and with new artists, I try to get to know their whole album a bit before I succumb to the shuffle lure.
This is an interesting one, because the album is a relatively recent phenomenon – the 50s or so is where it really happened. So if it really only lasted til the 90s, then that’s only 40 years worth of ‘album thinking’. I listen to jazz almost exclusively these days, and jazz from the 20s-40s, so I rarely think about that music in terms of albums.
Most of the songs I have bought recently (I have a wonderful emusic account) are from the Chronological Classics series (or other, similar sets), which just groups a series of recordings featuring one particular artist in chronological order on one CD. They’re really hard to buy on CD these days as they were produced by a now-defunct French company, so the downloads are invaluable.
But I don’t think about them as ‘albums’. With jazz I tend to seek out songs as recordings by a group of musicians, sometimes grouped under a particular band leader (eg Count Basie or Artie Shaw), but not always. So album, again, doesn’t really work.
And if I’m following a particular band chronologically (eg all the recordings by the Mills Blue Rhythm Band), the personnel in the band often changes according to location. These bands toured _all the time_, so they recorded in a number of cities during a year. And the personnel would vary depending on where they were. This means that you often get wonderful little 3 or 4 song (possibly with 1 or 2 out takes) sessions recorded in one city by one incarnation of the band. The other little groups tend to be transcripts of live performances – so a recorded radio show or live performance. They yield these amazing clumps of songs recorded live, in one take. So these days I tend to think about those sessions as groupings reflecting that band at that moment. But they’re definitely not albums, as they were released as ‘singles’ or ‘sides’ – 2 songs, one on each side of a record. And the earlier stuff was limited to about 3.5 minutes.
It’s all very interesting.
And I think that’s why I’d be rubbish at the 15 in 15 album game!