I went through a long stretch where I barely listened to any rock music, especially indie-rock. I don't know if I was burned out on it, or if I was just eager to explore other things (jazz and classical in particular). During that time I sold a lot of records that could probably be featured on this blog--Bitch Magnet's Umber was one of them (thank you to Adam for loaning me his copy so I could hear it again).At some point, probably about ten years ago, I went through my record collection, looked at each record and asked myself "Given that my time on earth is finite, do I really think I'll ever listen to this again?" If the answer was "no" I sold it, if it was "yes" I left it on the shelf. This is one of the records that ended up in the "no" pile. It's not that I thought it was bad, it was just hard for me to envision ever listening to it again.
My predictive abilities are less than perfect. Here I am today, some ten years later, and I listened to this album while driving to work this morning (on a iPod no less, another development I failed to predict). Some guy driving a Mercedes with a vanity license plate that read "VIP 1" cut me off. I laughed. Life is too short to get angry about people who think they're important. But hopefully it's not too short to listen to Umber a couple more times. It's pretty good you know.
