Shuffling, I'm Shuffling

 SHUFFLING, I’M SHUFFLING

 

 

From the start of my record collection, I was an album kind of guy and hardly ever bought singles, partly because of a value for money approach that an album of, say, 12 tracks and clocking in at about 40 minutes was a far better deal than a single with only two tracks.

 

The first and only single I bought as contemporary release, was Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and I only bought it because I loved the song and couldn’t wait until Christmas when I was going to get it as a present.

 

A couple of years later I bought some cheap singles from Sygma Records that had an entire table with old, unsold singles at bargain prices and I bought one single each  by Deep Purple, Foghat and Wet Willie  and two singles by Suzi Quatro. And that was it.

 

When I played a record, I  listened to the album from start to finish, and from 1981 taped all my records onto C90 cassette tapes so that I could listen to  an album as a continuous whole, with no need to turn over a record on a turntable, and so I came  accustomed to sequences of songs, the one following the other in a familiar, unchanging pattern and that eternal sequence became a kind of comfort zone of familiarity.

 

Many years later, when I got an iPod and then various iPhones on which I could load music, the “shuffle” function radically changed how I listened to and appreciated even albums I almost knew by heart.   

 

When you shuffle, say, 1000 songs off a collection of albums you not only get the benefit of, in my case, the best radio station on earth with an extremely eclectic mix of hard rock, blues, funk, soul, reggae, African music and pop but the best benefit, I found, is that began re-considering and re-appreciating songs played out of the context of a familiar sequence on a loved album.  The individual songs are heard in stark contrast to the preceding, often musically unrelated, and following tracks, and this generally means that I’m more alert to it than I would be if it were played in a familiar sequence where it blends in with the rest of the album and there is no special attention on it.

 

The effect is greatest and more rewarding with either leaser known songs off otherwise loved albums or albums that haven’t struck the same chord as the loved records, where I suddenly listen to this previously underappreciated song with fresh ears and more focus. Tracks that had seemed pleasant but otherwise not distinguished often  reveal intricacies in sound, arrangement, melody or lyrics that previously not been as apparent in the context of an album listened to in sequence. Even songs I’d thought of as mediocre now have new glamour, so to speak, and seem more worthwhile than in the context of the parent record.