Before I started this blog, I thought about devoting it to reviewing “famous albums that I wish I’d listened to before now”.  The obvious problem there is that people would probably be even less interested in reading my review of a 45-year-old album in the midst of so many other reviews by far more qualified people, than I would be in writing it.

Having said that, as an act of edginess (read: hypocrisy), I’ll probably end up doing exactly that from time to time.  But to kick things off, I’ll take a different approach.

A few times in the last several years, I’ve taken a particular band and worked my way through their discography in release order.  Since I do most of my music listening during my forty-five minute commute to work and forty-five minutes back, doing this basically means that I end up immersing myself in one particular band for a couple of weeks.  It also doesn’t hurt that I can finish an entire album from beginning to end during a single trip one way, more often than not.

I don’t know if anybody else does this.  Maybe I’m a lone weirdo.  But it tends to be an enlightening experience.  Much like life – there’s good and bad, some genius and some garbage, some unearthed treasures and some “wow, what was that shit?”  I get to experience the evolution and the progression, and go through the lows when they lose the script musically and the highs when they get back on track.

Couple that with a documentary or a concert movie or two, or at least a few single song YouTube clips, and the experience gets pretty immersive.  I invariably learn something in the process.

So, first up: the Rolling Stones.