Futurism Restated 103: Unpacking My Library

Notes on staying afloat in a sea of information (with apologies to Walter Benjamin)

My office

Today’s bonus newsletter is a special edition for paying subscribers in which I pursue an idea suggested by a reader.

A few months back, Dylan M. asked:

“After decades writing about music, I wonder if you’ve picked up some strategies for listening to all of this amazing new music while still making time for favourites.

My request: a totally left-field newsletter issue that goes over how you organize and sort through the music that comes your way. Like, specific things you do with playlists or notes or URLs. How you organize (or don’t organize) your music library. Do you make something like a to-do list for new albums? Really brass tacks stuff like that.”

That’s a great question with a complicated answer, and it goes to the heart of something I think (and fret) a lot about: how some of the mundane tasks of my job as a critic influence my actual experience of music, for better or—often, I suspect—worse.

I’ll get to the brass tacks of the question, but first, let’s back up, because I’m feeling nostalgic today. Before I get into specifics, let’s recall how things used to be, back in the analog days.

Barcelona, June 2007. Though I had called the city home since 2005, I had just gotten back from nine long months in Portland, where I’d been living in my mom’s basement, helping out while she recovered from a shattered heel, not two years since my dad had died. It was a generally terrible experience, but that’s a story for another time. More relevant to today’s topic is what was awaiting me when I finally got back to the apartment that I shared with my roommate, Omar, a crumbling wreck of a place in the heart of the Raval, on Carrer Nou de la Rambla, for which we paid just 500€ a month.