Tag: Kevin Smokler

Bookmarked In Praising of (Kevin Smokler)

Before I start in on an album, I will usually read its wikipedia entry as well as the review in AllMusic. I am curious about different performers, producers, engineers on different records and a little why the band might be trying something different this time around. I’m not musically smart enough to know what chromatic scales are or which studio results in this or that sound. But I like to have a sense of who had a hand in the choices that went into a record and who showed up on the day it became real. The answers are always more interesting than believing it all happened by magic.

I will usually listen to one album every two or three days in the afternoons during the scutt-and-boring-tasks portion of the workday. I’ll jot initial notes after the first listen then 2-3 days later revisit those notes and be rigorously honest if I was being unfair, impatient, etc. If I was doing any of those things, I listen again. If not, I scrawl a quick review to a group of friends with two goals in mind:  1. To have it be fun to read even if whomever is reading it doesn’t like the band/hasn’t heard of them. 2. To be clear in such a way that whomever is reading can hear the music even if they haven’t heard it before. My opinion is a distant third priority.

Kevin Smokler discusses his process for returning to a favourite artists full catalogue like returning to a long lost friend. Colin Marshall extends this by listening to each album, once a day for a week, to drag the process out.

This method (which I used most recently to navigate the nearly half-century-long catalogue of David Bowie) requires both an obsessive streak and a certain degree of patience: the studio albums of Dylan alone, which number thirty-nine as of this writing, took up most of a year.

This also touches on Ed Droste’s argument that it takes five listens to form a judgement.

Rob Walker builds upon this by building a playlist of missed/hidden gems that are often lost in time.

ᔥ “Austin Kleon” in Are you helping? – Austin Kleon ()