{"id":748,"date":"2012-06-16T10:06:26","date_gmt":"2012-06-16T14:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.westwoodvalley.com\/?p=748"},"modified":"2012-06-16T10:06:26","modified_gmt":"2012-06-16T14:06:26","slug":"my-musical-evolution-part-88-academy-days-the-45s-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wrharrison.com\/musicalevolution\/2012\/06\/16\/my-musical-evolution-part-88-academy-days-the-45s-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"My Musical Evolution – Part 88 Academy Days The 45’s Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

So here we are in the aptly named Academy Days<\/em> era. The era names still maintaining that epic stylized quality. As before with the BFMS <\/em>era, I’m going apologize for any chronological inconsistencies. The Academy Days<\/em> officially covered the Autumn of 1979 through Spring of 1983.\u00a0 As we saw in the last post, Heart Of Glass<\/em> has been designated to carry the torch into this era.<\/p>\n

As we enter the Academy Days, <\/em>I was still listening mostly to Kansas, Styx and Boston. Being on a Low Budget, <\/em> I found that for a while, 45’s were all that I could afford. So in the tradition of my dear mother who had hundreds of 45’s I collected about a dozen before\u00a0I realized that I much preferred albums. This preference holds true to this day. Was it developed back in the 1970’s? I can’t say. As you know, mom had a few albums but was all about the singles. I liked the idea that a single song on an album could attract my attention and that I’d discover other songs on the album that I would enjoy as much if not more. I think this philosophy is why I have such disdain for downloading songs.<\/p>\n

The arguement from the download a song at a time crowd is Why pay for songs I don’t want?<\/em> How do you know what you don’t want? You think a 30 second snippet from a song is all that it takes? When I think about all the music that I have acquired over 40 years and the volume of personal favorites that evolved over time it makes me ill to think that I would have passed them by had I not been committed to the album format.<\/p>\n

The other aspect is that I believe that an album is a single piece of art. Imagine just downloading the Smile<\/em> part of the Mona Lisa Painting or the shadowy figure in the hat<\/em> in the background of Munch’s The Scream<\/em>.\u00a0 When\u00a0I was a young metal head shortly after high school, I used to always skip Goodbye To Romance <\/em>from Blizzard Of Ozz<\/em>. Today it is my favorite Ozzy song. I never would have downloaded that song based on the 30 second clip that I would have heard at 19. I never would have carried it for years. I never would have heard it again. I would have missed out.\u00a0 I own thousands of albums and don’t have any regrets.<\/p>\n

Here are a few of the 45’s that I had briefly before they were replaced by albums.<\/p>\n

Neil Diamond – Love On The Rocks<\/em>
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