~~ "She has so many aliases, you'd think she was a spy!" ~~

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Minor rant


What is it with musicians these days not making lyrics easily available? I long for the days of albums with sleeves containing all the lyrics and info my little anal-retentive, trivia-loving heart.

I downloaded one…what do you call a collection of music that isn’t in a hard form? We’ll call it a CD for discussion purposes…one CD for which the band didn’t have lyrics available anywhere. Now, I’m listening to the new Fish CD (in preparation for Tuesday’s show!) and while the lyrics are available on his website, each song’s lyrics are in a pop-up box that goes away if you click on it. Well, what I’d like to do is copy them into a single Word file so I can print them out and read them whilst I’m listening to the bloody music! (Also, I can’t bump up the View size on the pop-up box, which would be helpful for my dreadful eyesight.)

Remember when we were teenagers and had the time to just listen to music? To buy a new album and sit with headphones on and read the lyrics and maybe start singing along by the third or fourth listen?

What was the last CD you did that with? (Seriously, I'm curious.) For me, it might have been Styx's Edge of the Century in (eep) 1990....

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I understand exactly what you mean about the time to listen. Something I'm finding very frustrating about studying is that music is becoming relegated to peripheral noise. I tend to to have it on when I'm studying because I find it helps me to better retain the information I'm reading, but increasingly I just don't plain listen to music. Even when I have the time, I find that I'm constantly jumping up, feeling that I should be doing something.
I suspect that's why I've recently been listening to so much Journey/Steve Perry - something about his voice allows me to actually just sit and enjoy, rather than feel the need to do something additional to listening.

Love, Anwyn

Ximena Cearley said...

(1)I would call it an "album". (I'm assuming here that the artist put the songs in a particular order and would prefer you heard the collection that way). After all, vinyl albums are called that after photo albums, which are a collection of pictures put together in a certain order for maximum impact. If it's just a random bunch of songs then it's a bunch of songs.

(2) Not all vinyl albums (or, later, cassettes) carried the lyrics, but I agree that the classier ones did. Since I don't typically download music (we're on dialup) I usually wait and just buy the CD. Most CDs nowadays carry the lyrics. Which leads me to

(3) the last time I sat down and listened to a new album while reading the lyrics was a couple weeks ago, Nick Cave, "No more shall we part".

(4) Suggested hack for the annoying popup issue: bring the lyrics up on one computer. Fetch your laptop, open a word document, and transcribe the lyrics manually. Worst case scenario? Use a yellow notepad and a pen.

(5) When will Rob and I see you again?

Anonymous said...

To copy images (or other stuff) that webpages do not want you to copy, do a print-screen, then past what you just copied into word, paint, or whatever.

Works for me ;)

Alia

Dayle A. Dermatis said...

Anwyn: The fact that we've become such a multitasking society is definitely part of the problem - I know people who can read while watching TV, which to me just seems like you're not getting the full experience of each. But the same is true of music, if you think about it.

And, yeah, it's also the time factor. We have so much going on that we feel guilty if we're "just listening to music."

Dayle A. Dermatis said...

Ximena! Good to see you here!

1. Several of us debated this a few nights ago and came up with the same decision: "Album" defines a collection of songs, not the format in which the songs are gathered. I realize that in my head, "album" equates to "LP" or "vinyl," which is just my problem. ;-)

2. Pretty much all the LPs I had included lyrics, largely, I suspect, because there was space to do so. (By the same token, I mourn the loss of big, gorgous cover art.) Cassettes were more hit-and-miss. I still generally prefer to buy CDs, but in one case, the music wasn't available on CD, only via download.

3. Good for you!

4. Ugh, I can't say I have time to transcribe lyrics. I ended up going to one of the million lyrics websites, even though they all (a) are eye-blindingly ugly, (b) contain annoying ads, and (c) often don't have the lyrics entirely correct. But it was enough to allow me to cut-and-paste into a Word doc that I could carry around while I listened to the music. (Which in turn allowed me to sing along at the concert!) :-)

5. Good question! I think we'll be making the Sunday lunch at the Hilltop on 6/22--any chance you guys could be there?