Blog1 min read
On the album you keep meaning to write about
Some albums work on you at a level that doesn't translate easily into prose. The honest move is to let the track speak for itself.
There's an album I've meant to write a blog note about for over a year. Whenever I sit down to write it, the words don't arrive, and I move on to something else. The album is fine; the post about it isn't. I've stopped expecting it will come.
This is true of about a quarter of the music I love. The albums I write about easily are not necessarily the ones I love most; they're the ones I have a clear, communicable angle on. The albums I love most are sometimes the ones I have no angle on at all — they've worked on me at a level that doesn't translate easily into prose.
For the rooms, this matters indirectly. A few of the tracks on the playlists are from the albums I can't write about. The track is doing the same work for the listener that the album did for me, just without the surrounding context. It's an acceptable trade. The listener gets the track; the album stays in the part of the library I haven't found words for.
I think most curators have this list. The albums you keep meaning to write about are evidence of the limits of writing about music — there are kinds of musical experience that the available words don't reach. The honest move is to leave those albums un-written-about and let the tracks speak for themselves, which they were always going to do anyway.