Sorted

It began fifteen years ago with Abbey Road, the first CD I bought.

Over the weekend I spent a few minutes sorting my collection of around 350 music CDs. They’d been in something of a chaotic state since the move, which tended to minimise the chances of finding anything I wanted to play. Sometimes a familiar song will spring into my head, and I want it pumping out through the speakers straight away. Without a well-sorted CD collection, such a thing becomes impossible, or at least highly unlikely.

Unlike John Cusack in High Fidelity, I haven’t agonised about different ways of sorting my CDs. Alphabetical is pretty much the only method I’d consider. By genre would be too confusing. Most of it broadly falls under "rock" anyway, so it wouldn’t help much. Where do you draw the line between rock and pop, jazz, acid jazz, blues, reggae… it’s all too hard. And I’m not about to adopt such off the wall sorting as year of production or colour of the spine (no matter how cool the latter might look after implementing it).

So alphabetical it was, with the compilations at one end.

Of course, there’s niggling questions. Does DAAS (Doug Anthony All Stars) "Icon" go under DAAS or Doug? Or Anthony? Does "Band On The Run" go under Wings, or McCartney, Paul? Simon Fowler and Oscar Harrison, comprising of half of Ocean Colour Scene, did a live album of mostly OCS songs. Does that go under Ocean, or Fowler? Or Harrison? Or should I throw all hard and fast rules out the window and just make it up as I go along? Yep, that sounds good.

Wait, do the comedy albums belong with all the other music, or in a section on their own? And if the latter, do musical parodies like "Bad News" belong with the comedy or the music?

Eventually I got everything satisfactorily sorted, so at least I can understand the order, and find things. And that’s all that matters really.