I have no idea how long this has been out, but I just found it yesterday. It's a cd box set containing all of the albums Nina Simone recorded with Colpix (1959-1964). Now technically I don't NEED this. I'd prefer to get these albums on vinyl. But I'm a bit of a sucker for THE BOX SET. There's something about having a bunch of albums (or cds) neatly packaged in a fancy box. The box design is kind of blah though so in this case I'm not getting sucked in by the packaging which is my usual problem. Here's the track listing.

This morning as I sat down to work, I once again faced another recent dilemma -- what to listen to? There are zillions of albums sitting here all nicely alphabetized on shelves and for the last six months I have been struggling to choose one to place on the turntable (or cd player). I don't work alone, but no one else seems to be of much help either. I'm in a bit of a music funk. Lately I play and replay a mixed cd a friend gave me so much that the music started making an appearance as the soundtrack in my dreams. It's time to take that one off of massive circulation.

So this morning I got the bright idea that we should force ourselves to go through all the albums alphabetically. That way we'd be sure to listen to something we haven't heard in ages -- maybe even rediscover something. So I went to the first album to see what I was getting myself into. It turned out to be Autechre. Not what I had in mind. Stumped before the first album even made it to the turntable. It's not that I don't like Autechre, it's that it wasn't what I wanted to listen to first thing in the morning. I needed "get-working" music.

We listened to all of side one of the Autechre album. Then I looked at the next album; another Autechre. Then the next was Antietam "Music From Elba". Damnit there is nothing in the A's that I want to listen to! Then I discovered that by my rules I would have to listen to six ABBA albums in a row. Forget it. The new rule is that we go through each record, but only play the ones we want to. I could have put on Chet Atkins or even Biz Markie, but in the end I jumped straight ahead to Burt Bacharach's "Living Together" because I wanted to hear "Something Big" which is nice and peppy for the morning. But good lord, get past that song and the album starts to stink.

The problem with this whole idea is that we have to continuously get up to change albums after that one good song is played or else suffer the torture of the other songs. I predict we'll be done with this idea by lunch.