The Keepers

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing a clear out. In truth it’s my 18 monthly CD cull with the exception that this year I’m putting all the CD’s back in proper alphabetical order.

I told my barber – an avid record collector himself – about all of this and he nodded sagely before explaining that he likes to do the same. ‘I mean, it’s not over complicated, Ricky,’ he confided, ‘just alphabetical for the artist then each album in chronological order.’ I realised I still had some way to go.

One of the most interesting aspects of ‘the cull’ as I like to call it is what makes a keeper and what propels the rejected LP towards my local Marie Curie shop. (if you want to double your CD collection head over to Shawlands now). I realised quite early on that there were many albums I really didn’t know at all. Perhaps I played one song on the radio or kept it because I thought I might return to listening, but ten or fifteen years on, I never have. It’s not that I don’t want to hear that record again, it’s just that, well…given the time we’ve all got on this planet it’s really not possible to listen to everything. Taking into account also we now live as a couple in a house made for a family of six, we shouldn’t really be filling it up any more with unwanted clutter. It’s not the first cull we’ve completed either, and yet somehow we have a shelf full of cookery books despite a very clear memory I hold of donating a car-boot’s worth of the dam things a few years back. Are they breeding?

The interesting question however is not really about what you throw out but what is the criteria for a ‘keeper?’ Almost 95% of that is nostalgia and sentiment. Even though the CD as a product is only 40 odd years old certain selections pull on my heartstrings and I can still remember where and why I bought them. So the task of the cull took a little longer as I wandered back and forward to the CD player to try to work out if I still loved certain records. In all honesty I was a little taken aback with some albums I could have sworn were favourites, which, as they spun round or crunched their digits or whatever failed to bring the expected smile across my face. I daren’t say which of these fell into this category but I will admit that my own listening preferences have changed. I’m less tolerant of the ‘original for originality’s sake’ recording and probably keener on the song that speaks to me despite the lack of exceptional studio wizardry. Somehow, in this phase of life (old I guess you would say) in my own writing and in other people’s I’m drawn closer and closer to  the simplicity of a song. Perhaps, as some have often asked me, I’m more influenced by country music than I ever thought possible.

However I keep a playlist on my Spotify of all that I hear and love that falls outside Americana or Country and often things come in that demand a listen. The inevitable will happen: the clear space on the shelf will disappear and some new additions will take up the slack awaiting another cull a couple of years down the line. If they make that, they can be sure they’ll join the keepers.

There’s a few lovely things on this week’s show that are certainly in my keepers list. We have a great Neil Young selection from a listener and we also mark what would have been Levon Helm’s 85th Birthday as well as cleberating the great John Fogerty’s 80th with a return to the chat we had a couple of years back. We hope you enjoyed our Mary Chapin Carpenter hour last week as we will also have a little bonus from that session.

All of this is available from five past eight on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio Scotland this Tuesday evening. Do join me live if you can.