I was wondering... How many records I can really say I know, instead of just saying i "have" it. My collection certainly has 100+ records I never had time to spin. I probably know each song reasonably well in 1000+ albums. Never counted and haven't got a clue. Has anyone else thought about this?
Goodos to you for actually having heard your albums! The reason I have so many albums I haven't yet heard is that I've received bundles of lps and never bothered to sort them through. Sometimes there's real gems in there.. It's weird, sometimes I've had them for years. I don't think spotify would make my question meaningless, since I'm not thinking about what we haven't listened to, but what we have. On the other hand I don't mean we should come up with concrete values or numbers on this. Obviously, a record you've heard 20 times you know better than whatever you've heard twice.
All of them. I listen to all my unsealed records, and all my sealed ones are just duplicates of ones I already own so that doesn't really count. I'm not sure why I would buy an album what I would barely listen to but I know some treat music more as a smorgasbord than as a juicy steak to be enjoyed. -Richard
Sometimes it's fun not to 'know' every track on an album too well, as it can sometimes feel like discovering a 'new' track by a favourite artist.
Don't think I really know any record in my collection, I maybe know the words or when the guitar comes in, sometimes I think I'm fed up with this, but then I play it and find something new. Maybe I have too many records.
Define "know". If you mean I've listened to it, then it's close to everything (yeah, I'm sure I've got a few stragglers out there). If you mean that I know the track order by heart / know the producer's name / who mastered it etc, then that number goes down drastically. There's some alums I have that I have listened to dozens of times, and you asked me to name the track order I would not be able to do it.
You guys are right, it's not really that interesting now that I think about it. Who cares, really. Yesterday I felt like it was threadworthy.
I listen to music based on my mood or how challenging of a listen it is. Having had, at one point in time, 300 plus albums, I really knew 40. I don't think I will ever know "Trout Mask Replica" by Captain Beefheart ; it's too much of a challenge and not pleasing enough to my ears. I will put it on every 3 years. I think I bought it for the intellectual challenge. On another note, I can easily listen to Bowie's "Alladin Sane" over and over again. It's a lot "lighter". I definitely think you can make the same analogy with jazz and classical music where the music becomes more cerebral.
Yes, I've thought about it. When I didn't have very many records, I knew every note backwards (they were played constantly). Even today, I can listen to the albums I haven't heard for decades and still know every note. Now that I have bought so many records and CDs, I can say that I "know" only a small proportion of them. That's not to say that I haven't played some of them many times, but now I tend to "know" the songs I like, and there are fewer purchases that I can say I really "know". There are many records/cds I have bought in the last decade that I've listened to many times, but when I look at them I now can't recall what they are like. And there are many that I can say I've only played once or twice, as they didn't engage me enough to put more effort in (or I didn't think that the investment of repeated listening would pay off). I feel somewhat sad that I don't have the intimate connection with as many recordings that I would like, but there's so much music out there that I want to experience.
They are mainly records I bought when I was a teenager or young adult , I guess I just played them far more often that the stuff I buy these days
I think it's interesting. I have a lot of music that I know very well such that if I never actually heard the songs again they'd still be with me. At this moment I'm listening to Sixty Six To Timbuktu (Robert Plant anthology) and some of these tracks aren't familiar to me even though I've had them around for years.
Same here. When I was a penniless student, I had a little amount of cassettes and CDs but in retrospect I feel I enjoyed that little collection way more than the -too big?- current one
There is a confusion here between know as in understand and know as in recognize and remember. To recognize a musical work is fairly easy while to recall it is very difficult. To understand it would require literary and musical analysis plus whatever aspects someone regards subjectively as understanding. I would say for the average listener that being able to recognize any changes to a work would be what would be called really knowing a work. So if we were to change a line of lyrics or change the notes in a solo or add a background instrument etc etc the listener could identify the change without listening to the original.