I generally have a hard time deciding what music to listen to…

I have my go-to artists. Okay, I have one go-to artist, period. Morcheeba. But they don’t work in lots of situations, so I end up sitting in silence a lot.

I think a major reason for this is that I’m not very intimate with my music collection. I don’t necessarily associate an artist/song name with its genre or mood. AND I have a lot of junk that I’ve picked up along the way.

So, since I have a ton of time on my hands these days, I started a quest to get to know, cultivate and expand my music collection.

By the way. This obsession kind of goes along with my need to meticulously organize my closets, and my insane photo tagging procedures, which deserve separate posts altogether. Organizing is my crazy.

Bear with me… I’m going to inform you beyond your will about the six steps in my Easy Listening Project. Starting with the first two steps:

STEP 1: Listen to all of the music in your collection by artist from Z to A.

This exercise made me realize that I had a lot of artists in my collection that I thought I liked, but didn’t. Moby, for example. Dumped all but a few of his greatest hits.

I started with the letter Z and worked my way up the alphabet because I’ve over-listened to a lot of my A artists.

Next, and closely related…

STEP 2: Listen to all of the music in your collection by song title, this time from A to Z.

I started this quest per my sisters suggestion, and am not finished yet.

However, when I did the first exercise, I would often skip songs or hustle through some of my favorite artists because I was tired of their type of music. Listening to my collection organized by title puts songs from different artists up against each other, so I can judge each one on its own merits.

You can check my LastFM page if you want to know where I’m at right now!

I’ve already deleted a lot of junk. Intro-type songs especially, that didn’t stand alone without the rest of the album. And I’ve deleted a lot of gratuitous screaming songs, ahem, Modest Mouse.