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Repeat Performance

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I was wondering if there was certain favourite music that you constantly regularly listen to, say on a monthly basis, and have done so for years. I’ve read people mentioning it before and it intrigued me as it isn’t something I do. I find not exactly that familiarity breeds contempt but it does take the shine off old much-loved favourites of mine so I only listen to those quite infrequently to keep the magic alive. Normally I listen to new stuff, or at least music new to me, and have anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand tracks on the go (normally in a year) that I listen to multiple times before moving on. So if you do have regular “repeat performances”, what bands/artists/albums are they?

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  2. Van Halens Fair Warning.
    The bands fourth studio album and to me the best of the first Diamond Dave era.

    Somewhat darker than than the preceding albums…a few of the tracks seem to reflect a seedier, after the weekend, mid week in glamtown vibe.

    A couple of tracks are really slowed down and almost bluesy….at least as far as EVH understands the term….but even these feature frankly audacious guitar playing and his famous “brown sound” much in evidence.

    If your experience of VH only stretches to “jump”, this could be an eye opener.

  3. The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers every week of the year, usually around lunchtime on a Saturday and some of the playlists I compiled from Deezer like Pop Into Jazz (everything from Matt Bianco to Return To Forever) and West Coast (yacht rock, dinghy rock, ute rock, anything Paich/Porcaros/Lukather and Vinnie Colauta played on from ’76 to ’83, mandatory Fender Rhodes and Loggins/McDonald backing vocals).

  4. There are no albums I listen to every month but there are several I listen to at least a dozen times a year, usually in one or two blasts on repeat. They are:

    Revolver
    An edit of The White Album
    An adjusted Young Americans
    Aladdin Sane
    An adjusted Tanx
    Swordfishtrombones
    Rock Bottom
    Lady Soul
    Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club
    Fresh
    Forces Of Victory
    Chapter Three
    More Songs About Buildings And Food
    John Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard
    Round About Midnight
    Genius Of Modern Music Vol 1
    Out To Lunch
    Blues & Roots
    The Last Record Album
    Everything Must Go
    Countdown To Ecstasy
    Goats Head Soup
    Untrue
    No Deal
    Kid A
    I Am
    C’est Chic
    Fresh Fruit In Foreign Places
    Parade
    Doolittle

    I’m turning into a sad old man. Obviously newer albums are too new to qualify as yet.

    • Which “Chapter Three” is that, Tigger?
      Is it Joe Gibbs & The Professionals’ “African Dub All Mighty Chapter Three”

      A very fine choice if it is …

      • I’ve spent so much of my adult life chasing the thrill of first hearing that album, which is the best-ever dub album if you ask me. I know a lot of purists think the effects are overdone but for me that’s what dub’s all about. The more doorbells and chickens the better!

      • Thank you for asking. I do it to improve my personal listening experience.

        Tanx includes a prune of mostly dross and the addition of contemporaneous singles and B sides

        20th Century Boy
        Free Angel
        Tenement Lady
        Rapids
        Mister Mister
        Electric Slim & The Factory Hen

        Children Of The Revolution
        Jitterbug Love
        Life Is Strange
        The Street & Babe Show
        Highway Knees
        Left Hand Luke & The Beggar Boys

        Young Americans removes the two Lennon tracks. Fame is a single, of course, but sits more happily on Stationtostation after TVC15. Across The Universe can be the B side. The rest are available from the 2007 issue, far superior to anything on the box set.

        Young Americans
        Win
        Fascination
        Can You Hear Me

        Somebody Up There Likes Me
        Who Can I Be Now?
        Right
        It’s Gonna Be Me (with strings)

        I have various iterations of the White Album, including the Shite Album (see podcast).

    • Have recently heard the Harlem Square Sam Cooke and it was quite a surprise. A totally different rough edged, raucous and a bit naughty performance to the smooth sounding Sam on his studio records.

  5. I play The Retrospective Soundtrack Players’ “It’s a Wonderful Christmas Carol” on repeat for most of December. It’s a fantastic record but 3/4 of the songs mention the festive season, so don’t work at other times of the year.

    I have to limit myself to occasional spins of their parent (The Dawn Chorus) band’s albums, too. If I ever hear one, I want to play them all on repeat.

    If I ever get tired of hearing them, you can all put me in my box.

    • Oops, forgot Christmas albums, which I have on a playlist in the kitchen on repeat for much of December. It varies from year to year but there is always Phil Spector’s Christmas Gift To You, The Jackson 5 album, Elvis Presley’s first one, Ray Charles’s, Nat King Cole’s and Charlie Brown’s by The Vince Guaraldi Trio.

      • I’m still managing to keep the other three to the rule that no Christmas songs get played before December, as the wife and kids listen to them over and over (and I get fed up arguing with them that the Jona Lewie, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and East 17 ones are not ruddy Christmas records, it’s just that the compilers of Christmas compilations needed to fill the space!).

        I have a secret weapon this year though. Hopefully it will be third time lucky, because the Dylan one and Hall and Oates one didn’t annoy them enough and put them off playing Christmas records forever, which was the plan. In fact, the kids love a couple of the Dylan ones. But let’s see if the William Shatner Christmas record is the one to do it…

  6. Not albums but tracks:

    Elbow – Starlings
    Eels – Climbing to the moon
    Rolling Stones- Paint it black/Miss you
    Steely Dan – Barrytown/Hey Nineteen
    Paul Simon – American Tune
    Waterboys – Red Army Blues
    Leonard Cohen – So long Marianne
    Joni Mitchell – Shades of Scarlet conquering
    Tom Russell – Guadalupe
    Mary Chapin Carpenter -The Rhythm of the Blues
    Lucinda Williams – Those three days/ Side of the road
    Elivis Costello – After tbe fall/ The scarlet tide

  7. Tends to be just tracks for me too.

    Stolen Moments by Oliver Nelson
    A Sprinkling Of Clouds by Gong
    Corner Pocket by Count Basie
    A Little Busy by Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
    Friday Night At The Cadillac Club by Bob Berg
    Wooly Bully by Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs
    Sorrow Tears And Blood by Fela Kuti
    Good Rocking Daddy by Etta James
    Free Money by Patti Smith
    The Light Pours Out Of Me by Magazine
    Trampolene by Julian Cope
    A Salty Dog by Procol Harum
    Love Is by Kangaroo Moon
    I Put A Spell On You by Arthur Brown
    Little Girl Blue by Nina Simone
    Black Crow by Joni Mitchell
    A Go Go by John Scofield with Medeski, Martin & Wood

    etc.

    • I don’t particularly set out to listen to old fave tracks but if the mood hits me I don’t resist.
      Currently I’m still working my way through the unplayed tracks in my digitised library, along with any unheard recent additions. A very nice Brad Mehldau version of River Man came up, earlier this evening.
      Currently drawing closer to the end of the “B”s and I have an old Primevals album, about half of a shitload of old Duke Ellington recordings and about half of Dylan’s “More Blood, More Tracks” to be played. At some point I need to start on all the unplayed podcasts too.

  8. Over the past few years I’ve totally changed the way I listen to music, so I tend not to repeat things very often, apart from albums from the current year. I’ve also started the daft project of ranking all my albums for each year, so that dictates most of my listening. As I choose a new year to finish, I tend to listen to all the (as yet) unranked albums I own from that year, usually just the once. I get through around 20-30 albums per week for the project and the outstanding years have a range from 25 to 102 albums to listen to, so some years take longer than others.

    However, I’ve also been on a pretty intense quest for ‘new’ music, so I am constantly trawling blogs looking for recommendations, exploring genres I know nothing about and downloading/buying albums that have passed me by over the years. So if I get any new albums from a year that I’ve already ranked they would take precedent, as would albums from the current year. I tend to relisten to, say, all of my top 75 for the current year at least 2-3 times and to my favourites 6-10 times throughout the year, so by the time the year finishes I am pretty comfortable with their positions (the list for this year has 152 albums, and I am able to see that Mojo’s number 3/Uncut’s number 2 is my number 141!). I currently have half a dozen at the top of the pile and can’t really decide on their order yet, so I’ll probably have a run through of them a couple more times. J. Cole currently sits at number 1, but there are a few I really like so it’s tricky this year. Last year’s was easier, as it was a two horse race between Brother Ali and Gary Numan.

    My brother-in-law thinks I’m bonkers for listening to so much new music, as he only really listens to a handful of new albums each year, but he listens to them a lot and gets to know them well, like we used to do when we got new albums as a kid. I see his point, but I like it that whenever I listen to albums now they sound fresh, so I’m able to give the album more attention than I would if it was the umpteenth time I’d heard it and knew the songs well, if that makes sense. I have so many records that I know inside out to the point that I don’t really need to ever listen to them again.

    Having said all that, occasionally I have a couple of days off and play what I want (maybe Abbey Road, Jordan: The Comeback, something noisy by Mogwai or some Kraftwerk), or when I’m in the car or the kitchen I might put a playlist on (Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Pet Shop Boys, Stephen Duffy, Dylan, The KLF or The Stranglers). When I was still able to have a few pints I’d stick my Paul’s favourites playlist on my iPod and listen to my favourite songs on the bus on my way home.

    I should have the project finished in a couple of years, if I can stop adding to it, so I guess my listening habits will change again, unless I come up with another stupid idea. I already listened to my iTunes library from A to Z a few years ago (it took a few years to complete), but the library has almost trebled since then, so I’m not doing that again!

    • Gosh, Paul, I am in awe of your listening and listing yearly protocol. It must be a full-time job! I do trawl blogs too but limit it to a couple, or more if I am searching for a specific album review.

  9. I’m with you Carolina, I simply cannot understand listening to the same record year after year – except of course Pretzel Logic and Ella & Louis Vol 1 which because they are covered by Lodestone’s 1st Law of Rightness never fail to delight on a Sunday morning whilst I make scrambled eggs and toast.

  10. I find I tend to gorge on a certain artiste of whom I own the entire collection and tend to play their stuff almost exclusively for a week or two focusing on an individual albums for a few plays before moving on. The way I tend to listen is to the album the way in the sequence it was recorded for a couple of listens and then on shuffle repeatedly so I can get to know individual songs better.

    Admittedly the only artistes that can stand up to this sort of practice is the very apex of modern music – in ascending order of how frequently listened are I would say 1) Leonard Cohen 2) Joni Mitchell 3) Steely Dan 4) Van Morrison 5) Neil Young – after this I would say that Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Nina Simone, Clash, Can, Iggy Pop and possibly the Triffids would make up the next bunch. Beatles and Dylan I do like certain albums but don’t quite have the same effect on me.

    In between this bingeing I snkack lightly on CD’s of 80’s 90’s second divisioners – either charity shop acquired or from the local libraries hoping to find acts to join my ‘Top 10 Can’t get enough of them/never grow tired of’ canon.

    • PS – Reading back my listening choices above I’m struck by the journey I’ve had from my 14 year old punk rocker self (albeit already a Bowie, Stones and Kraftwerk fan) and I would never have guessed that these acts would make up 70% of my listening now!

      • I do a binge every couple of months: Thin Lizzy, The Chords and Chris Pope solo stuff, and … The Macc Lads being the most recent.
        Usually surprised by how much of it I had forgotten (but not sub-consciously forgotten).

        I’m toying with the idea of a Who-binge, but I just need to build up strength for Face Dances and It’s Hard

        Amazon Marketplace is/was good for binging tendancies – I decided to do a Genesis binge, despite only owning 2 albums.
        For the grand sum of (around) £25 I got my hands on the complete catalogue (except Calling All Stations (which came later as a “gap filler”) and From Genesis To Revelation (which I still don’t own)

  12. It depends whether I am playing for me or playing for others who might hear. The latter requires an extensive trimming of what is deemed suitable by them, as most decent stuff is deemed either too lively, too discordant or too dirgey. Given they seem to have telescopic ears that hear what I am enjoying, even if I am in another country, I seem often to hear a lot, on repeat after repeat after repeat of only what the missus likes. That can be fine for the first 1000 listens but I can eventually flag.

    • That’s a point. My alarm sound is The Charlatans playing Can’t Get Out Of Bed and has been for years. I hate mornings, so generally I grow to dislike whichever song I use to wake me up, hence I have to change it regularly. I think the longest I managed was around 6 months with Distant Light by Burial, but I’m a good couple of years with The Charlatans.

      On another note, I had a look at the top 25 most played on my iTunes the other day. It has been comprised of audio stories for the past 8/9 years. Firstly my daughter’s, but now my son’s, as they have them on at bedtime. And as they tend to listen to the same stories again and again, there are some chapters of David Walliams books with playcounts of around 300. But the other day I noticed, in 5th place, Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen. My son has a habit of sticking songs on repeat whilst he goes to sleep, which explains this song from the Hello Neighbour game having crept into the top 30, but his liking of Queen is only a few weeks old and that isn’t one of his favourites. So I just cannot explain how it’s suddenly appeared up there. To put it in context, the highest playcount for songs that I would listen to is around the 70/80 mark.

  14. Dylan and The Doors but whatever I am currently listening to I tend, to go against the prevailing vogue, to play over and over again. If it’s good enough for 2018, it’s not good enough for me.

    At the moment … bit awkward … Dee Dee Warwick … who is quite possibly the best soul singer I’ve ever heard. Who knew?
    As I say … bit awkward.

    • I’ve always had a soft spot for Bauhaus, but I think that a good compilation album is all that you need. Their albums tend to go all over the place.

      The funny thing about the goth-type acts is that they tended to be better at singles or EPs than they were at albums. Siouxsie and the Banshees had some very good singles, but I’ve never felt the need to own any of their albums. The Sisters of Mercy are best experienced on their early EPs. Even the Mission and The Cult had some good singles.

  16. I don’t deliberately play anything on a regular basis. My commute is anywhere from an hour to 90 minutes most days and I play my iPod. I do press the skip button a lot but whenever a track from ‘My Aim Is True’ or ‘New Boots and Panties!!’ plays I always listen to it. I must have played those two albums several hundred times since 1977.

  17. The Name of this Band is Talking Heads (disc 2).
    In Rainbows – Radiohead
    New Gold Dream – Simple Minds
    Chateau Revenge – Silver Seas

    All the above are albums I listen to week in, week out. Mostly I listen to an MP3 player when at work with around 2,000 tunes (I have my own office). I never get bored with it and at home it’s mostly Spotify where I seek out new stuff as much as familiar stuff. I also have lots of single artist compilations on minidisc that I play rather than single albums.

  18. New Gokd Dream
    Remain in Light
    Tour De France Soundtracks
    TRON:Legacy
    Low, Heathen, Scary Monsters
    Architecture & Morality
    Dazzle Ships
    Organisation
    The Art of Falling Apart
    Difficult Shapes…
    Violator
    The Scream
    The Queen is Dead
    Meat is Murder
    The Smiths
    Strangeways
    The Fat of the Land
    Black Celebration
    Ultra
    Music for the Masses
    Cupid & Psyche
    Provision
    Republic
    Rythmn Nation 1814
    Ray of Light
    Technique
    Behaviour
    Please
    Actually
    Very
    Replicas, Pleasure Principle, Telekon

    Compilations – Kate Bush, Depeche Mode remixes, Squeeze, UB40, Beautiful South, Sound of the Suburbs, Snap (the Jam), Pet Shop Boys, Michael Jackson, China Crisis, New Order, Bowie (ChangesOne and ChangesTwo and Best Of) Beatles Rarities and Blue and Red comps, Kraftewerk Minimum:Maximum, Madonna Immaculate Collection, Siouxsie.

    I revisit all of these quite regularly as well as perhaos hundreds of one off (mostly) cheesy singles. Not that eclectic I concede and – blow me down – I was a teenager in the 80s – but I like what I like and I’m as God made me.

    • That’s interesting you revisit so much of your youth’s favourites. I tend to swerve those in favour of other stuff, but that might be because my youth wasn’t that great.

  19. Soft Machine 7…other individual tracks by other people (a playlist of minor key fado features a lot, as does Solid Air)…but SM7 has me in it’s gravitational pull just now.

  21. Not specific tracks or albums but Friday morning at work is women only. Mostly it’s country or americana so I do listen to 6 or 7 Emmylou Harris albums and several Linda Ronstadt ones a lot. These days they’re joined by the three Brennen Leigh albums I have. Tomorrow it’ll be an Amy Rigby fest ahead of seeing her for the first time in a few years in the evening.

      • I ‘discovered’ her by accident. The fabulous Whitney Rose sang a Brennen Leigh track (Analog) on her mini album and announced it was a Brennen Leigh song when she sang it at the Green Note. I guess that’s the sort of info I often miss these days with so much stuff downloaded and no sleeve notes to pour over.

  22. Great thread. My ones I come back to a lot are

    Steely Dan – Royal Scam
    Little Feat – Dixie Chicken
    Tull – Songs from the Wood
    Al Di Meola – Elegant Gypsy
    Johnny Winter – And Live
    Rory Gallagher – Irish Tour 74
    Deep Purple – Come taste the band
    Nic Jones – Penguin Eggs

    I could go on…

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