Links

Protest this

I received an email from my friend Mark, who runs Iron Man Records. He forwarded me a petition that’s doing the rounds, and while I’m … Read more

Might as well send it to me too…

Dropbox

After receiving a bit of encouragement (let’s not call it nagging) from a bunch of musicians who love the SoundCloud service, I’ve added a Dropbox to my sidebar. There it is, just under the Search bar. That way, if you want to send me one of your songs, you can just click it, upload – and I’ll get it in my Soundcloud Inbox.

I quite like the service – even though you can only upload 5 tracks a month without paying. It’s useful for promo-ing, for sharing tracks with people you’re working with and also for putting songs on your own site (though Bandcamp does that one better).

Here’s an example.

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Greatest Hits Compilation

Greatest Hits Record

When I was growing up, I used to love a series of albums called Solid Gold Hits. They were compilations of the hits from the year gone by, and they came out just in time for Christmas shopping. The first one I owned, if I remember correctly, was Volume 11 – and it had Bad, Bad Leroy Brown by Jim Croce on it, which kind of dates me. I was six years old.

I came to like compilations, and gravitated towards ‘Best Of’ albums as I grew older. I wore out my copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits (the first one with their good songs) and even today in my jazz-loving older years, I love a well-curated collection of best tunes from a scene, an era, a label or a single artist.

So in the tradition of the industry whose activities I describe and discuss, and like every good mid-career artist, I’ve decided to compile a greatest hits album.

The purpose of a Greatest Hits is to do three things:

1) to encapsulate and summarise the highlights of a career to date and provide a benchmark document that celebrates past successes;

2) to provide an entree for new fans by collecting together a representative sample of work that has proved popular and thereby give a user-friendly way into exploring the back catalogue;

3) to save the effort of having to come up with any new stuff for a bit.

So, using PostRank.com as my guide, and with a bit of judicious executive producing, what follows is my greatest hits collection, complete with brief liner notes. It’s not a top-10 list and I haven’t ranked them in any order. Think of this as a compilation track listing, and imagine – if these were songs on an album, this is the order in which I would suggest ‘listening’ to them.

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