I started doing this partly as a means of getting a grip on the overwhelming amount of music I've accumulated over the past several years, and partly just because I enjoy it. The accumulation is mainly a result of subscribing to eMusic, also of the wide range of used CDs available in local stores and at SecondSpin.com, and to a lesser degree the sales at BMG. I have literally more music than I can listen to. In the days when eMusic offered unlimited downloads for $10 per month, I grabbed anything that looked interesting, and sometimes hardly listened to it at all.
My newly adopted practice is to take one recording–one album, to use the old term, one LP or CD–per week, and listen to it and write about it. There's one rule: I have to listen to it at least three times. I find that this is enough to give me a pretty good sense of what I really think of it, time for those works that don't have instant appeal to sink in, and for me to see through those whose appeal is only superficial.
And here is my somewhat idiosyncratic rating system. I feel obliged to strike a blow against the terrible phenomenon of ratings inflation. Most people silly enough to do this sort of rating use a system of five stars (or whatever) and hand out the full complement too often. And when they don't like an album very much at all, they assign it only two stars, or in rare cases one. Why should something you don't like get any stars at all? In memory of my school days, and in signification of my earnestness, I use letter grades, of which, as you know, only four indicate any sort of approval.
A: This is a masterpiece, something nearly perfect. The world at large and I in particular would be worse off without it. I don't plan to give many As.
B: This is a very fine work, a favorite to which I will often return.
C: I like this work but not intensely, or it has some significant defect, or it's idiosyncratic in some way (perhaps it's merely interesting)–for any of these reasons, it's not something I will want to hear very often.
D: It was mildly enjoyable, or at least parts of it were, but I may never listen to it again.
F: I don't like it much at all. I may even hate it. I definitely don't want to hear it again.
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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