Music Journalist / Label Rep Survival Guide – Chapter 1

You Know You Have Too Many CDs When:

— they outnumber your woman’s shoe collection 8 to 1.

— you’re able to lean comfortably on the pile stacked beside the CD player with your shoulder and it remains upright.

— they are found in every room of the house including the bathroom.

— you don’t think twice about using them for scraping the remnants of dinner off your plate and into the garbage.

— you’ve discovered they can be used to ensure maximum and uniform coverage of peanut butter on toast. The only problem is getting the peanut butter out of the jar, although the inlay cards seemed to have solved the problem quite nicely.

— liner notes are used as reading material for those extended visits to the bathroom.

— you’ve built a replica of Stonehenge with jewel cases. To scale.

— putting them in alphabetical order requires a full weekend and justifies the consumption of at least two two-fours within that time. As this is a one man job, chances are the following weekend will be spent rearranging things so that “V” comes after “U”.

— you annoy the people in the next building by creating a mirror using your Megadeth catalogue to reflect the sun into their living rooms.

— boring, rainy Sundays are spent building jewel case domino tracks with an average run / fall time of at least five minutes.

— visitors to your humble abode are used to hearing you say “Oh! I have that album? Cool!”

— you’ve been seen arranging your CD-Rs in order of colour as pertaining to the spectrum. They find it strange. You don’t.

— what the hell do I need to buy a pizza cutter for? Gimme a break…

— your living room looks like it was endorsed by the Ikea shelving unit division. The only words you know in Swedish are “Ivar”, “Fjus” and “Laxvik”.

— you’ve invented new sub-genre classifications as part of your own unique “filing” system. These include:

– Melodic Demonic Pop
– Large-Breasted Symphonic Hottie Metal
– Un-Metal Metal
– Fugly Rock
– Singers That Should Quit While They’re Ahead Metal
– Iced Earth Yawn Metal

— there is more than one Warrant album in your collection.

To be continued…