My One True Love

I love music. Honestly, I know people say they “love” things all the time, but I really mean it. Don’t believe me? Well, take my average day for example:

I wake up at 6am to the sound of two alarm clocks (I really don’t like getting up in the morning). The one next to my bed is an iHome tuned to The X, a decent alternative rock station in the ‘burgh. The other is one of those good old black hotel alarm clocks, which plays the most annoying sound ever conceived by man.

After I come out of the shower and do my hair, I hit the space bar on my computer to turn iTunes onto whatever I was listening to the night before. I take a swig of whatever juice is in the fridge, turn off the tunes, and hop into my car. I have a 6-disc mp3 CD changer, and I always have about 50% of my music collection hiding in a container in the back seat.

As soon as I get to work, I put my 160GB iPod into it’s dock, plug in my stereo headphones, and listen to music whilst I work the day away. A coworker often comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder to say, “Jay, how is the control tower treatin’ you this morning?” I just smirk and politely turn off the tunes and have a nice chat.

My evenings home consist of a large percentage of time involved with iTunes and tweaking my collection (Right now, I’m listening to music of the 1970’s…549 songs as of tonight). I now have gone through all 7500+ songs and ensure that the name of the song, Artist name, Album name, album art, and original year of release are accurate and updated. I also have everything rated on the not-so-good 5-star scale. My next hurdle is to fill in all the genre section in order to make some killer playlists…I haven’t tried it yet, but Billy Joe sent me an email about Tune Up, a pretty cool looking program

I also like movies a lot (don’t worry, I won’t go into detail about that). Anyway, this evening, I caught the movie Almost Famous on one of my over-priced movie channels. It is the best of both worlds; its a movie, but it is immersed in the world of…music! Well, that got me to thinking about what makes a great movie, and more specifically, great movies dealing with music. Therefore, I decided to throw together a list of my top 5 music-themed movies (in no particular order):

• Almost Famous
• High Fidelity
• The Blues Brothers
• Empire Records
• This is Spinal Tap

Honorable Mention goes to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, School of Rock and Reign Over Me, which isn’t exactly fitting with this category, but it is more musically related than some other movies. Then, we have all those great films with killer soundtracks. Such as: Trainspotting, Hackers, Breakin’ (don’t laugh), Footloose, Dazed and Confused, Ocean’s Eleven, anything by John Hughes or Wes Anderson, etc.

I think Almost Famous hits home for me because when I was younger, I always wanted to be a journalist (as you can tell by my posts, I made a good decision by going into the sciences). I really would love nothing more than to go back in time and be a teenager during the mid-1960s through the early 1970’s. To experience the origins of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Cream, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, some later Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Queen, any so many more…would just be unbelievable.

Today, I can say I love these acts because I’ve been able to sort through their entire collection in one sitting and pick out what I like. However, to experience it chronologically, it is so much different. Would I have liked all these artists from their first albums without knowing the great songs that might come later? Not everyone burst onto the scene with top-notch albums like Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut or Jimi’s, “Are You Experienced“.

So, I guess what this seemingly never-ending post is just supposed to say, I really liked the movie, and could relate to the character of William Miller easily. Most people would discredit my above list for not including the Beatles…but that is precisely why they aren’t on there. This movie wasn’t about some giant act (although they were mentioned a great deal throughout the movie); on the contrary, it was about an up and coming band, and how they were struggling to come into their own. William wasn’t just along for the ride, he was actually a part of music history!

Note: I LOATHE Moulin Rouge, so I don’t want to read any comments containing those words…no reason why, because I don’t need one.