Tag Archives: Music

Daily Album on CD: ‘Born on a Pirate Ship,’ Barenaked Ladies

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This CD is the first of many things in my music collection. It’s the first one I ever (as an adult) that on its release date I raced to the music shop to purchase it and immediately listen to it the moment I got home. It’s also the first one I have had signed by the members of the band. In addition, it’s the first one I ever had to replace due to it getting excessively scratched after years of rough handing.

This is the album that BNL was supporting during the New Year’s Eve 1996 show where I first encountered Paula Cole, and it really was the soundtrack to my first several months of living in NYC after moving up there in July 1996. I can still easily recall listening to this album on my Panasonic Shockman player when walking along the east side of Central Park in the evening while walking back to my apartment on Yorkville section of Manhattan from my job just off of Times Square. While “The Old Apartment” became the band’s first US hit, it wasn’t one of my favorite tracks at the time. Those were “Shoe Box,” “If I Should Fall,” “Break Your Heart,” and “Same Thing.” However, in the years since, my favorite track off the album, and one of my all-time favorite deep cuts by anyone, has become “Just a Toy” — a dark anthropomorphic dive into the mind the marionette Gepetto made just before Pinnochio and the jealousy he harbors against his younger brother.

The other interesting thing about this album is that was released as an Enhanced CD, meaning that it was encoded with Mac & PC software that allowed you to interact with additional bonus material when you put it in your computer. Unfortunately, the experience of using the Enhanced CD features is long gone as neither operating system allows you to play that software anymore. In fact, the Mac OS doesn’t even recognize the file system used on the CD, so it’s impossible to even check out the assorted sound and video files that the software used (this was something I was still able to do roughly 10-15 years ago.)

Daily Album on CD: ‘This Fire,’ by Paula Cole

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Opening acts are the crapshoot of going to concerts. Frequently, you’ve never previously heard of the opener, but the fact they are opening for the headlining act typically means that the headliners like them enough to believe that more people should know about them. I’ve gone to enough concerts over the years to absolutely forget a significant percentage of the ones I’ve seen. Others I remember because they were either awful (to my ears) or in the case of one particular band, they were so aggressively boring that I actually feel asleep in my seat during their set. There were a couple who were the reason I actually went to the concert — 4 Non Blondes and Echobelly — and then there was Paula Cole, who utterly blew me away and inspired me to get their most recent album at the next opportunity.

She was actually one of two opening acts on the evening that Barenaked Ladies performed a show at the former Roseland Ballroom in NYC on New Year’s Eve, 1996. Cannot tell you who the other one was, but Cole left a lasting impression. I don’t recall anything about the success of This Fire or any of its singles at that moment in time, but the energy and raw emotion she displayed that evening made you pay attention. Over thirty years later, I don’t recall any of the rest of her setlist, but there’s no way that “Throwing Stones” — my personal favorite of the This Fire album — Cole didn’t play it that night. The memory of her absolutely pounding the final chords of the song out of the piano combined with the way she almost screamed the final lyrics is just too firmly planted in my memory for it not to have happened. That song alone would’ve made me want to get ahold of it for my music library, but the rest of her performance left no doubt that buying the album was the prudent choice.

Oh, BNL was also spectacular that night. It was my second time seeing them live, and thanks to the concert, it was the closest I have ever been to Times Square when the ball dropped (the Roseland was approximately 10 blocks away.)

My Year in Music (Frak Spotify Wrapped)

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To repeat what I said last year in My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped), though I have a Spotify account, the way I use the service – which, not coincidentally, I have just canceled our premium family subscription plan to because of the variety of ways it is an absolutely shitsome company – simply doesn’t reflect or capture the overwhelming amount of music listening I do. Because of this, the 2023 Spotify Wrapper inspired me to begin exporting on December 1 of each year the usage/meta data from my actively curated Apple Music library, which contains over 23,000 songs that we actually own. Thanks to some above-average Excel skills, this is now the second year in a row I’ve been able to assemble a report to Spotify’s while denying them the ability to gather the user data needed to both create it and, more importantly, monetize and use it for their own nefarious needs.

So, without further preamble, my 2025 year in music…

Listened for 54,871 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so,) or 38.1 days of music. I would like to note that my recent transition into playing whole albums on CD rather than through my music library is not captured in this data.

Played 4,501 different songs (I often simply shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad” by Tears for Fears, 41 times.

The top song leaderboard:

  1. “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad,” Tears for Fears
  2. “Astronaut,” Tears for Fears
  3. “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars
  4. “The Girl That I Call Home,” Tears for Fears
  5. “Dear God,” Black Landlord
  6. “Emily Said,” Tears for Fears
  7. “Landlocked,” Tears for Fears
  8. “Close to Me,” The Cure
  9. “Change,” Tears for Fears
  10. “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen

The first five Tears for Fears songs were an EP (of sorts) of new material embedded at the start of their 2-disc Songs for a Nervous Planet album, which was otherwise a really good live best-of compilation. I listened to that EP independently of the rest of the album frequently, which caused those songs to dominate the list. Just to see what the Top 10 have looked like without those songs, here are the next five in the list:

  1. “And Love Goes On,” Earth, Wind & Fire
  2. “Turns the Love to Anger,” Erasure
  3. “Self Control,” Laura Branigan
  4. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” Eurythmics
  5. “Echo Beach,” Martha and the Muffins

Moving on…

Listened to 1,161 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 650 times for a total of 2,881 minutes. (This was the second year in a row that they top my list, and it wasn’t even close.

My top artists, based on song plays:

  1. Tears for Fears
  2. Erasure
  3. Pet Shop Boys
  4. Depeche Mode
  5. Barenaked Ladies
  6. Duran Duran
  7. Eurythmics
  8. New Order
  9. Suzanne Vega
  10. Ghost

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, Suzanne Vega would fall out of the Top 10, and The Alan Parsons Project would move into the 10th spot.

Finally, attempting to determine which album I listened to the most is exceedingly problematic, though I feel I have a very good guess as to how Spotify calculated it. So, without attempting to come up with parameters for filtering and sorting the data in an effort to determine it, I’ll just note that there were two albums released in 2025 that I listened to each over a dozen times: Flying With Angels by Suzanne Vega and Skeletá by Ghost.

My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped)

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As I stated on Bluesky and Facebook yesterday, I only use Spotify to try out new-to-me music before deciding whether I like it enough to purchase it (preferably on CD in order to rip my own high quality digital tracks) and add it to my Apple Music library. Thus, Spotify Wrapped doesn’t properly present my listening this year.

However, last year I planned ahead and at the time Spotify started providing last year’s Wrapped reports to its listeners, I performed an export of the listening stats and associated song data from my Apple Music library. Then when this year’s Wrapped reports went out, I did another such export. Thanks to some decent Excel skills, I was able to create a similar report without having my data mined.

Here are the expanded stats:

Listened for 57,404 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so.)

Played 4,922 songs (I frequently shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, Florence + The Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over,” 40 times.

The top song leaderboard:

1.  “Dog Days Are Over,” Florence + The Machine
2.  “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson
3.  “Dear God,” Black Landlord
4.  “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen
5.  “Gronlandic Edit,” of Montreal
6.  “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” KISS
7.  “Off the Wall,” Michael Jackson
8.  “Rapture,” Blondie
9.  “My Demons,” Tears for Fears
10.  “West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys

Listened to 1,183 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 715 times for a total of 3,179 minutes. (This was the year I deep-dived into their catalog, listening for the first time to four different albums, which included this year’s new album of concert tracks plus five new songs.)

My top artists, based on song plays:

1.  Tears for Fears
2.  Erasure
3.  Barenaked Ladies
4.  Pet Shop Boys
5.  Duran Duran
6.  Weezer
7.  They Might Be Giants
8.  The Decemberists
9.  Eurythmics
10.  The Alan Parsons Project

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, They Might Be Giants would fall out of the Top 10 all the way to 14th, and Depeche Mode would move into the 10th spot. TMBG really do write songs that are much shorter on average than those released by nearly all other bands.