I’ve tasked myself with the challenge of only listening to albums that came out in 2001 during the month of January, culminating in a top albums of year list, along with a mixtape or playlist containing a single track from each of the albums that made my list.

In February I’ll move on to 2002, March - 2003, April - 2004 etc… up until November with 2011. Then, in December I’ll switch back to 2013 and brush up on this year’s releases. I spent most of December 2012 brushing up on 2012 albums anyway hence me starting from 2001.

If this goes as well as I hope, I’ll be doing the same in January 2014, but starting with 1990. This let’s me do my 2014 catch-up in December again.

Pretty neat eh?

Since my entire collection has been well organised and digital for many years, it was very easy to do a simple search for all my 2001 albums. I then whittled down a shortlist of albums I either recalled as being ‘brilliant’, or stuff I wanted to brush up on, transcoded them from FLAC (lossless) to M4A (lossy) and copied them onto my iPhone - taking up a whopping 20GB. This not-so-shortlist consists of a whopping 328 albums! I’m using Last.fm’s shiny new Scrobbler app to listen to and love everything as I go — ‘cos if it doesn’t scrobble, it doesn’t count!

That’s obviously A LOT to get through. Works out to roughly 11 albums or ±8 hours of music listening a day! I have no illusions about keeping that sort of pace up, so I’m brutally culling albums as I listen. I.E. If I’m not feeling something it’s straight on to the next one! Saying that, I totally plan on basking in the good ‘uns.

There are of course some caveats: I’m not going to completely ignore new releases, and I’m also going to be brushing up on some stuff for upcoming gigs etc. along the way too.

Wish me luck. I’ll let you know how it goes!