Goodbye 2015, and welcome to 2016.

Welcome to 2016 and the end of a drought in posts here. 2015 saw me writing more and more often than for some time and so a couple of weeks away seemed to be in order. One of the things I have discovered over time is the longer the time that I do not write for the harder it is to get started once again. The hardest post of all was the very first. I guess that is why I'm still here 1084 posts later and in the tenth year of 'Thoughts on music'.

Plenty of listening has been done however and some new thoughts are ready to be written down. That is after some unfinished business in regards of those lists of 2015.
It is true that 2015 was the year in which I embraced streaming in a big way. That is not to say that I have abandoned physical formats. This is now rather focussed on supporting new artists, often via crowd funding or otherwise buying music direct from the artist.

Not everything is available to stream although it might seem that way. Even if it were I think that I would still want this LP for real. This is one of my treasures of 2015. USPS took most of the money to get it from NYC to Frome!

Forty years ago - and the first LP from the first professional all-female bluegrass band.

An interesting dilemma.

About this time last year I mentioned that I was going to start listening over again to all of my long-list of music (EPs and albums together) that I had noted should be considered for those end-of-year rituals. In the end I did that, twice over, and the result was that I whittled that list of fifty-something down to just twenty LPs and a handful of EPs. Some were something between; let us agree to call them mini-albums for sustained quality, not length, is the defining criterion here. That process now needs to commence all over again.

I'm fine with that but there is a nascent problem. I'm pretty sure that my qualifications for inclusion on this long list are every bit as discerning as was the case last year. It is absolutely vital that this is so; as it stands today my long-list currently runs to one-hundred-and-eight items. A quick survey suggests that on average each is 40 minutes in length. To put it another way, if I were to start listening now (21:15 Tuesday) with no breaks at all I would get to the end of it early on Friday evening!
I'm not planning to do that, not least because I also have live music to go and see tomorrow evening.
It also brings me to another issue. That of all the live music that I have seen in 2015 and the discussions, both in person and remotely, about that. The good thing about this is that I certainly have a lot to reflect on!

My next two posts will both be in the series 'New Music 2015'. Both about albums released in the last couple of weeks, that should logically be included in the category of UK folk, and yet they are two very different beasts indeed.
I shall aim to make sure that both posts are published simultaneously. The order in which they actually appear will be decided by the toss of a coin. I'll get someone else to do that for me and with the outcomes known to them beforehand.
What remains true from the start is that, even as my taste in music has evolved over these last nine years and it most certainly has and in ways I might not have anticipated, I will not chose to write posts about things that I don't much care for. I do make comparisons in order to explain why I favour one thing over another. I regard that as something inevitable.