I'm no Casey Kasem.

Wow... my last blog entry was from April 3! How did I let so much time go by? And that blog entry was a music review. Like all great plans of mice and men, this project of mine isn't working out. What project? Well, I sometimes fancy myself as the keeper of all things musical. I feel this incessant need to hear EVERY album that comes out, at least one track, and select from it my top albums of the year. Why do this? It's a combination of several reasons.

First of all, I love music, and I'm constantly looking for great music to listen to. Often, I find it hard to find it on the music services. If I didn't do this, for example, I'd have never known that Meat Loaf had a new album out this year. I JUST learned about Linkin Park's newest. The face of the music business has truly changed. I also don't want to limit myself to the ridiculously overhyped "pop" offerings. I'm convinced that the best music out there is the stuff we'd never hear about unless we search EVERYTHING.

Secondly, For the longest time, I've had dreams of being Casey Kasem. He wasn't just a radio personality, and the voice of Shaggy, he was the keeper of all musical knowledge. Growing up, I would listen to American Top 40 religiously, and I actually believed that Casey himself had complied the top 40 list, and researched the answers to the listener questions himself. I wanted to be that guy. In college, I compiled the top songs requested at the college radio station. I broadcast that list of top requests every Saturday. And nobody cared. Except for me.

Which brings me to 3... In typical blogger fashion, I'm taking myself way too seriously. The whole concept of Blogging has gone from being an online diary to being something we, the writers and video recorders, believe is actually making a difference. In this case, I envision myself as the one responsible for introducing you all to these albums, and giving them the exposure they so richly deserve. Maybe I am, on a very small scale, maybe I'm giving my opinion too much credit. It's necessary to go forth with ANY bloggery (It's a word...now!) with that delusion that everyone in the entire world is just waiting for your next entry. Otherwise, I, personally, would lose all interest in doing it.

They way I conceived this "project" was to consistently listen every week to the new releases. Then report back to you. I'm WAY behind. And frankly, a lot of this stuff is crap. But, occasionally, as I did so far, I'll highlight something great. Life's too short to listen to mediocre music, so, I'm even limiting my personal library. But THAT'S changing too.

Used to be, in the days of Napster, I would download new music, and then delete it if I didn't like it. I stopped buying music, and started "renting" as a "To-Go" subscriber, and that transitioned, when Napster became Rhapsody, into me listening on the website. When my old school Blackberry curve evolved into a Droid "Smartphone" and I moved out of the boondocks of merely having phone and texting into city life of unlimited data, I used the Rhapsody app to access Rhapsody's database and play directly from their server, or "the cloud." In my current state of budgetary issues, I'm considering moving on again, from the subscription service of Rhapsody, to the free Facebook-linked service of Spotify.

If Spotify's search engine is better than Rhapsody's (which sucks majorly) I may do my searches from there from now on. Whether that will make this self-indulgent project of mine easier or more complicated, I don't know. All I know is I went to my phone for musical entertainment for my Memorial Day Barbecue, and had no idea what to play.