I’ve been collecting albums since before I was a teenager and have amassed quite a collection over those many years. I moved to CDs pretty early and have a boatload of those as well.
I used to be an album person. I love the process of choosing an album to play, staring at the shelves waiting for something to jump out yelling “Play Me, Play Me.”
Over the last couple of years that has changed though. My albums are up in the spare bedroom that I used to call an office. Now that laptops are the norm and my computer doesn’t live in there anymore, I don’t use that room and the albums sit on the shelves, unplayed.
The CDs are close, neatly organized on wall shelves in the living room but they also don’t get much use. I have been using streaming services for ages, starting with Rhapsody in the early 2000’s and moving through them all, Pandora, Launch (Yahoo Launch), Yahoo Unlimited, Slacker Radio, Groove, Grooveshark, Google Play Music, Rdio, Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Apple Music and probably others long forgotten.
I like streaming services, they are convenient and honestly I don’t mind not really “owning” my music. My last.fm year end report for 2025 says I played 18,515 songs from 2,676 different albums last year, (56 days, 15 hours of music) so $10 month or so is a fucking bargain compared to what it would cost to purchase all this outright.
But I have gotten a bit lazy when it comes to listening to full albums. I have lots of playlists I have created over the years, and all the services have mixes and lots of radio options you can create from any artist, song or album. I listen to some albums, some things just flow better as albums and there are a bunch in regular rotation, but there are a lot that have been neglected, and I miss them.
So I have deemed 2026 the year of the album. I am going to revisit some old favorites and hopefully find some new stuff to bring in to the fold. Today I listened to Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star for the first time in must be twenty years and it was fucking awesome. Like running in to an old friend.
Over the last couple days I have also listened to:
- Flowers in the Dirt – Paul McCartney
- Earth Sun Moon – Love and Rockets
- Seeds of Love – Tears for Fears
- Woodface – Crowded House
- Dignity and Shame – Crooked Fingers
- First Place – The Brook & The Bluff
- Shades – Doyle Bramhall II
- Lost in the Dream – The War on Drugs
- Easy Tiger – Ryan Adams
- Run Your Race – Kandace Springs
- The Last Drag – The Samples
Some of these are well known to me, some are absolutely new. Some I will probably never listen to again. But that’s ok. It’s nice to choose something and just experience it all the way through.
Sometimes random is good too so there is still a place for the mixes but otherwise it’s albums, albums and more albums.
If you want to follow along, you can always track my listens in real time on my last.fm profile.
As Genesis said, “Put another record on….”
Your thoughts?