I’m writing this without having anything meaningful to say, really; I have a very brief window of opportunity to write, so I’m here.
The day job continues to be insanely busy and stressful – but in a good way, by which I mean that the stress is due to having an insane amount of work to do in a very short amount of time, rather than having a sociopathic boss trying to belittle and emotionally manipulate me. One of these is much better than the other.
Ordinarily I’d be deep into my GOTY post by now, which is usually my favorite post to write. But I’m completely unmotivated to get to it. I filled out a Top 10 ballot for Unwinnable’s year-end poll and I did it so half-assedly that I’m contemplating taking it back until I can actually do it for real. I can’t tell if my apathy is due to the utter lack of emotional investment I have in anything I’m currently playing, or if it’s just that when I look back on 2015, very little stands out. I have a top 3 that I could give you right now, and maybe a top 5 if I thought about it for a little longer (and expanded the category to include iPhone games), but beyond that I’ve got nothing.
I’ve been thinking about doing a Year in Music post, except that I couldn’t really do it by album anymore. Spotify has so utterly changed the way that I listen to (and discover) music that my old criteria simply doesn’t apply, and I’m just not listening to albums as much as I’m listening to my own curated playlists. I have a Favorite Songs of 2015 playlist; a Favorite Songs From the Weekly Discovery playlist; and I also have a playlist which is full of songs that are what I want my forthcoming album to sound like. I don’t know if anybody else besides me is interested in that stuff, though; it’s so hyper-specific that it probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone. If you were to listen to these playlists, you’d have a pretty good map of my emotional geography over the last 12 months; but that’s not really the same thing as a critical analysis.
(Speaking of which: I’m currently trying to work on lyrics for this album, and ugh. It’s tough. Lyrics have always been the weakest link in my songwriting chain, so much so that for years I abandoned them entirely. It’s doubly tough because this album has an actual theme, which kinda needs words in order to properly articulate. Ultimately, I’m very afraid of someone writing something like this.)
I’m around 2/3 of the way through “number9dream“, aka the second David Mitchell novel. I’m not necessarily seeing any parallels to the larger Mitchell universe, though the book itself is still very enjoyable on its own merits. It’s closer to “Thousand Autumns” than his other work if only because it’s following one character very closely, rather than jumping from person to person, location to location, era to era the way his other books do. If nothing else, this exercise is simply reinforcing the notion that he’s my favorite author out there right now.
Anyway; that’s what’s up, in case it gets quiet here again over the next few days.
Shouts From The Couch 