Discography...

Even by my standards, this is geeky: I am about to evangelise about the joy of the Discography. How, if you really want to get to know an artist’s music, you should get all of it together and then listen to it all, ideally in chronological order.



Of course, apart from mild fits of insanity and making your Last.fm profile look like you're a massive fan boy in a very short space of time, this will do a few things:

1. You'll get to hear everything, good and bad, that the band/artist ever recorded. If you're still a fan after that, and haven't stabbed your speakers in despair, you're probably onto a good thing.

2. You will more likely than not get to follow the so called 'musical journey' that said band/artist has gone on.Par example, I recently did this with the Bright Eyes albums and got to follow Conner Oberst’s journey from indie-acoustic munchkin to weird electo-folkie then again onto a classic American country style singer vibe, then back to the weird electro for the latest album. Not only did I really enjoy listening to all of this music but it was, and I feel no shame in saying this, pretty interesting too.

Of course this won’t work if you're listening to Meatloaf, who has never gone on a 'music journey', or skip the songs/albums you think you don't like...

3. It’s fun.



Now this can sometimes be very easy. Sitting above me in a pile of CDs, I can see single CD discographies for both Minor Threat and Heroin, which I could listen to in an hour or so quite easily. However if 80s/90s hardcore and emo isn't your cup of tea and you prefer songs longer than, say, thirty seconds, it is a more challenging task.

The feat of pulling together every release by an artist or band can in itself be a very impressive little feat. As I write this I'm currently at the start of an attempt to listen to everything Morrissey has released, which is over 100 tracks and 7 hours of music. Luckily for me this is all either on my iTunes or Spotify, but if it wasn't I'd probably cry just thinking about trying to get hold of all of that music, and my bank manager would probably smile, predicting me imminently going overdrawn...



But I digress, not that I had much of a point in the first place. If you can, I'd really recommend having a crack at this. Pick your favourite few artists and see if you can manage it. If nothing else you'll get to listen to some of your favourite music, and I'll bet you learn at least a little something or grow to like a few songs you didn't really know before. And that can't be a bad thing right?



(Oh and another thing, currently going through a little Bjork phase so here’s a video for you all...)