Browsing my Brain

Today, it happened again that I was picking my brain for the title or artist of a song whose melody popped up in my head. Alas, I remembered neither. I imagined however, vividly, what the album cover looked like: a dark silhouette of a cyclist on a red-tinted orange background. Now, in the old days™️ of records or compact discs, most likely I also would have remembered approximately where in my collection that record was stored.

I never was one to organize my discs meticulously by alphabet, or artist or label. But I had large chunks which belonged together by some parameter meaningful to me, be it a certain era, group of artists, label, gerne or whatever made sense for me to group records on a shelf or crate. Finding a song or album in such a case would have been a matter of homing in on the region on the shelves and then browsing maybe 20 to 30 records.

That’s one reason why I still cherish my collection of physical records¹. I love to look at full size covers (well-done gatefolds are a joy to open up and peruse), read the liner notes (pretty much gone in the digitial era, aren’t they? There were digital album packages including booklets as PDF at one point in time. Today, Apple Music makes a half-assed attempt at sometimes providing a summary of the album contents. But proper liner notes on musicians, production, nice artwork of lyric drafts, all that is gone for worse). Maybe this is one reason for the resurgence of vinyl in recent years, as more and more people feel² what’s sometimes missing, despite the convenience of having all available music at your finger tips.

The next best thing in the digital world, I think, was Coverflow, and I was sad when it was removed from iTunes. I do not understand why it has not been kept at least as an option.

Now today, at first I browsed by genre. I vaguely would have associated the song with some (sub-)genre of soul³. That approach failed⁴.

Then, I thought to remember something from the chorus like go on, or move on, and I tried to narrow down by searching for titles containing on. I know, not a very specific search term, but it was the best I could come up with. As luck would have it, scrolling through the song titles, eventually the album cover I looked for showed up. Curiously enough, the song title was not the one I was looking for, but both title and artist contained the search term on.

Apple Music files the album under Alternative, by the way. As to why is anyones guess, but the record label is an indie⁵, maybe that’s why.