I’ve begun sifting through my mp3 player, culling my favorite tracks from albums and jettisoning the rest. That probably sounds like the obvious thing to do but I must admit to being somewhat of an album freak. I usually have to hear a work in its entirety so that I can appreciate the artist’s statement as a whole and listen to each song in context. Or something like that.

Lately I’ve come to the realization that I have an obscene amount of music and only twenty-four hours in a day, a significant portion of which is spent working and sleeping. I pick up a few albums each week and there is so much that only gets a cursory listen before being cast aside in favor of the next one. I’ve decided I need to pare down to select tracks so that I can enjoy a greater quantity and variety of the choice stuff I really want to hear.

Of course there are some albums that are stellar from start to finish, so I can have my cake and eat it too in those instances. I’ve left myself an out in case I fall off the wagon. So far Slanted and Enchanted, Marquee Moon, and The Modern Lovers have made the cut in their entirety. Most albums are chopped down to one to three tracks though.

My ultimate goal, the Holy Grail of this effort, is to cram my 30 GB player full of just my personal favorites so that I can press random- that’s right! I said it- and leave it all to very controlled chance. I just can’t bring myself to do it until I finish the weed out because I’m fairly certain that the first hundred or so songs would turn out to be of the ponderous ten minute quiet-builds-to-a-roar post-rock variety. And that wouldn’t be much fun.

Okay, so maybe you can bump the descriptor from that phrase, “album freak.”