I’ve always appreciated show recommendations from Dead Heads. The encyclopedic knowledge of show dates, setlists, and other information related to the that some people carry around inside their craniums just amazes me at times. While I may not be the world’s most hard core Dead Head I do spend a lot of time listening to the band.
Primary Objective: Post about a particular version of a Grateful Dead song (or thereabouts) every day for the next year. If all goes well, I’ll certainly keep going.
A few guidelines for the project:
- Posts: The goal is to have 365 posts in a year’s time. It may not be possible to post one per day for obvious reasons. Some catch-up may be inevitable. Regardless, the goal is for 365 over the next year. After that, we’ll see what happens.
- No repeats. As in the same version of the same song. For example, the studio version of “Althea” from Go To Heaven will only appear once, but other versions of the song are fair game. At the same time, some songs are traditionally paired with others, e.g. China/Rider, Scarlet/Fire, etc. It seems a bit overwrought to break these down into two successive posts so some days may cover a sequence rather than a single, standalone song. Click over to the DFAY Stats page to see a break down of all the selections. I’m interested to see how my listening habits evolve over the project. At the end of every month I will post compiled data about that month’s selections as well as a running analysis of the entire project as well.
- Try to stick to material that is commercially available. This is a tricky one, but at the end of the day the sonic quality of the commercially released material is the best possible version available and I want to steer people toward the best. This has become somewhat problematic in recent years as the releases from the Dead’s camp tend to be limited edition, which can hamper the ability to get samples for the project or for people to purchase a given album, but as things move toward digital pretty much all physical media is limited edition. At the same time these parameters provide me with a finite, albeit large, set of source material in good audio quality from which to choose. I will do everything I can, and within copyright law, to have a version of each track to listen to, but just know that it may be impossible to have for EVERY track.
- Primary consideration is for the Grateful Dead, but Dead related material is fair game too. This means solo projects, post-Jerry configurations, and covers, etc. The Dead’s oeuvre is not just restricted to the band proper and there are some great side projects by band members and cover versions out there. Again, I will try to limit these to commercially available material in an effort to ease procurement of quality audio.
Of course, these guidelines may be revised along the way and nothing is set in stone, but I think it’s good to have some type of framework at the outset.
My intention is to, when possible, address WHY a given song was chosen on a particular day. Whether it be weather, special occasion, my favorite sports team winning or losing, or whatever it may be. I’m interested in the way that Grateful Dead music affects and interacts with my life. My hope is that others may consider this question as well.
While I listen to a lot of Dead I do like a wide variety of other stuff. So I may include notes about what else I listened to on a given day. Again, nothing is set in stone and the primary goal is a Dead song per day. That should be sufficiently challenging. Everything else is (Wavy) gravy!
Thanks for reading and I hope that you find something you like here. Feel free to leave comments or touch base on Facebook or Twitter.
