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Please find herein, hopefully for your pleasure and enjoyment, an audio memoir-in-progress called “Album”. The structure of this project is to take the mostimportantdeeplysignificantsupermeaningful songs to me, split them open, and pour in my own history…to assemble an “album” of my life. Now, one might assume this would be fodder for a book, but I’m old, you see…old enough to have had my key musical milestones come from an AM radio station, or delivered in the form of a 45 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) vinyl single (purchased at an establishment called a ‘record store’), or - if your allowance was big enough - packaged with a bunch of other tunes of questionable merit in an audio entertainment product called an “album”. An “album” was originally a bunch of 78 RPM disks in a fold-open, accordion-ish cardboard book-thing. The name carried over when the technology improved to where all this data could fit onto one 33 1/3 RPM vinyl record. The songs were usually dictated to the singer by mohair-sweatered Artist & Repetoire record executives in order to cash in on a hit single. Then, the folksingerpoets and the hippies and The Beatles took over, and they turned an album into a complete artistic statement - often with a single, unifying concept presented as a suite of related songs. Sometimes these albums were extraordinary, and became the definitive art objects of their day. Sometimes they sucked…but at least it got the creation of popular music out of the clutches of the guys in the mohair sweaters.  It’s also my hope that the songs I pick for my album will have meaning for you…be part of your "album". If you like what you hear here, please share this site with others. Oh…and check in again soon – more songs on the way! Best… Chris Butler  Spin to Main Index |