I’m not generally an obsessive person. I like a wide variety of music, TV, movies, and books. Yet I often become stuck on one CD and will listen to it about 75% of the time I’m at home listening to music. Right now it’s Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “The Ultimate Collection”… I can’t seem to get enough of it! Every song is perfect, and she shows just the right amount of emotion and longing in her voice. She was truly the bomb-diggitty in her day.
Does anyone else do this? What are you obsessing on right now?
I’m like that. Last winter it was Al Green, during the summer, it was The Shins and The Smiths and right now it’s Keane.
I also tend to dig out my old CDs and listen to them quite regularly. Crowded House is one band I love listening to on a semi-regular basis.
I usually listen to whatever is the newest cd in my collection over and over, until I get another CD. Recently it’s been the GitS:SAC OST (For the acronym impaired, Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex Original Sound Track). I also have the Be Human SAC soundtrack, but I don’t like it as much.
I’ve been going back and forth between the new Nightwish and A Perfect Circle albums the last week or so.
For a while I was compulsively listening to The Stills, The Smiths and Broken Social Scene. I’ve moved into more diverse music, since I’ve begun to convert my collection in to MP3s.
I’ll especially do this if I get a new album from a band I love. When Hail to the Thief came out, I must’ve listened to it close to 50 times in a row.
No, a lot of people do this – although there’s probably an interesting bell-curve distribution to be charted for the music obsessives showing just-how-many-listens-over-how-short-a-period. Maybe I’m just brain-damaged, but I once kept a cassette tape of the XTC album Oranges and Lemons in continuous play in my car for about a year after it came out, which I would listen to as a default alternative to the radio. After a while, it became quite funny, but my fixation was such that even though the situation became increasingly absurd, for that year I simply couldn’t bring myself to remove it from the deck, as much as I wanted to want to remove it (if you know what I mean).
What I normally do now is keep two rotation piles going: serious obsessions which I revisit repeatedly over a few weeks or months, and everything else, which gets played once or twice before getting refiled.
The most recent album I’ve given the most relistens to over the past couple of years is the Candidate album Nuada (2002). Very good acoustic folk-pop by an obscure U.K. group, criminally neglected, under-distributed, and under-exposed everywhere. I’ve listened to it about fifty times, but who’s counting? :rolleyes:
I’ve been listening to the Garden State soundtrack nonstop for about a month now. It’s *always *on in my CD player.
I also have my obssessive fits. Right now Help is in my car stereo and has been there for the last week and a half. Before it there was a month and a half I only listened to The Rolling Stones while in my car.
I will occasionally do this, but it takes something pretty special to grab my attention that way. The only two albums in recent memory that got me are Solefald’s In Harmonia Universali and Arcturus’ The Sham Mirrors, both of which I highly recommend.
For about a week awhile back, I would alternate between The Promise Rings “30º Everywhere” and …trail of Deads “Source Tags and Codes”. Which makes sense, because no two other albums I have sound more like these two (even other TPR albums.)
What’s even more funny is: these aren’t newly-acquired CDs. I do this with good CDs I pick up occasionally, but I’d had both these CDs for at least a year.
Sometimes if I like a song I will listen to it over and over in a row and I mean like 20 times in a row and later on I will do it again until I get it out of my system.
This is odd for me but the last song I was obsessed with wasn’t rock or rap in fact it didn’t even have words it was called “Take Five” it’s Jazz music I think I had that song on a loop for about a half hour the other day.
I am glad I am not the only one. Since I was ten years old with my first Beatles album, I will tend to listen to a collection of tracks over and over and over again until I grind it into the ground. It’s just something I have to do.
Last fall it was the Outkast double album. Then it was the White Stripes’ Elephant, and De Stijl.
And yeah, it is not always something brand new. I have a lot of stuff on vinyl which eventually I get on CD. Or sometimes an old CD strikes my fancy.
Right now I am grinding the ‘Garden State’ soundtrack into the ground.
This would not be such a big deal except for the fact that I might not be the only one listening. I drive other members of my family nuts with this habit.
Once I listened to nothing except the band Self for like four months. Especially the Subliminal Plastic Motives album. That is one great album. I’m also always “rediscovering” old albums and playing the hell out of them for a couple of weeks then forgetting about them. The last album I did that to was the self-titled Elastica CD. Lately I’ve been obsessed with a bunch of mp3s of this band called Ima Robot. I’m sure that when I get the album for Xmas I’ll become obsessed with it too.
I don’t think I’ve ever listened to the same song more than five times in a row though. Although I’m sure that there’s some people who think listening to the same song five times is crazy.
I will have the same five albums in the CD player at home for months and months and months at a time. When I get something new that bumps out one of them, the bumped album often gets taken to work, where I listen to maybe 10 or 15 albums in rotation – they tend to be a combination of fairly recent stuff and stuff that’s been around forever. (Orchestra Baobab’s Pirate’s Choice has been in semi-regular play for about three years now – McLaughlin/Santana Love Devotion Surrender has been in and out of the play list for, geez, 30 years now.)
Maybe not 75% of the time, but Back to the Mono Kero by eX-Girl is in really heavy rotation right now. I’m surprised so few people have heard of them, since I think that album is one of the best of this decade.
Yeah, that’s not uncommon. For about a year I could listen to little else but Bach organ music, especially those performed by E Power Biggs on the Flentrop organ at Harvard.
don’t most people do this? I sure do - rarely though; and when I do, I love it because it means I found something I can really sink my teeth into.
Last few I did this with include the two-albums-on-one-CD of Big Star (#1 Record/Radio City), White Stripes, Social Distortion (their newest and a best of burn I made).
Gotta love it.
I remember 20 years ago not being able to listen to anything other than Prince for literally about 6 months. I started with Sign O’ the Times (you could physically see the extra wear on the grooves of the song “It”), and then backed up and went through his entire discography to that point…talk about an education - that was priceless.