The Wheel of Time dropped me on Wednesday, September 1, 2010, and this time it found something I had actually been hoping would come up, which is a nice change from staring at a pile of old tweets and trying to decide whether complaining about my phone constitutes a story. Among the tweets was this little progress report: “I am on the last album in Z’s. I’m getting really close to being done. Just the #’s left and no/strange named albums ( ( ) for example). #fb” I was nearly done listening to every goddamn album in my iTunes library, in alphabetical order by album title, a project I had started almost a year earlier because I needed to do some housekeeping and apparently the appropriate tool for that job was a thirteen-month listening assignment. When we found it, my response was, “HOLY SHIT! I WAS HOPING WE’D FIND THIS ONE!” So yes, this one gets to stay. Put down the veto lever and get your headphones.

The reason for the whole thing was very straightforward, even if the solution was a little elaborate: I had too much stuff that I had… acquired over the years, and I needed to figure out what I actually wanted in there. Having music and listening to music are related activities, but it is entirely possible to get way out ahead of yourself on the first one, until you have a large collection of things you might conceivably enjoy someday if you could remember they existed, and meanwhile you keep listening to the things you already know you like because those are right there and being alive already involves enough decisions. That wasn’t going to clean anything up. I wanted to get rid of music I didn’t like, fix the stuff that was mislabeled, and finish with a library that I had actually been through, so I decided I would play the whole fucking thing, one album after another, until there wasn’t anything left to evaluate. What better way‽

I helpfully left numbers behind, because Past Me occasionally does something considerate for Future Me between all the jokes and broken links. On September 20, 2009, I tweeted, “I once played through all my music in alphabetical order by song name. I’m thinking of doing it by Album name. 1201 albums, 47.5 days.” Please observe that this was already a repeat offense. I had previously marched through the music by song title and had apparently enjoyed that enough to come back with a different sorting column. The original Alpha Album Rules post, which has survived and been imported into this very site, gives the starting inventory as 12,931 items, 47.5 days, and 61.64 GB of music. That is forty-seven and a half days of actual playing time, before allowing for sleeping, working on something that required my ears, or any of the other unreasonable interruptions that life insists on making. Even the letter A was going to take 3.2 days, according to my opening announcement. I looked at that and said, “Alright, let’s do this.”

The album-title part matters, because I wasn’t just having a long Tom Waits phase and then moving over to somebody else when I felt like it. The alphabet was the DJ, and the alphabet did not give a shit what kind of mood I was in, whether two records sounded good together, or whether I had any particular interest in whatever was about to come out of the speakers. It only cared what the album was called. In November I had to explain this to somebody on Twitter, pointing out that the next records were Chopin: Complete Etudes and then CCR’s Chronicle, Vol. 1, which is a perfectly reasonable transition if your entire understanding of music consists of knowing that “Chop” comes before “Chro.” I had turned over programming to the same basic technology that organizes a phone book, and it was going to make sure I encountered all the things I could otherwise keep meaning to listen to without ever actually listening to them.

Naturally there were rules, because once you have decided to turn cleaning up your music into an endurance event, you might as well write down the regulations. I had to listen straight through each album in alphabetical order, and if I couldn’t listen to most of an album, approximately 51 percent by the very official constitution I posted, the whole album had to go. The point of making myself sit there with it was that skipping had consequences; I couldn’t just hop over the things I didn’t like and then leave the album untouched, because leaving things untouched was how I had arrived at this project in the first place. My memory of it now is, “I couldn’t skip. If I skipped a song, it meant I would be in danger of having to delete an album.” It was drastic, but it made me make a decision, which was the entire reason for doing it. Every album would eventually get its turn, and I was going to have to deal with it when it did.

There is a little difference between the rulebook and the way I remember administering it, which seems worth keeping because I have both sitting in front of me. The written version says to delete only full albums, except compilations and best-of records, where individual songs could go. The version I described years later was that an album with mostly bangers stayed intact, while something with only one or two worthwhile songs could be stripped down to those survivors and the rest thrown out. Those aren’t quite the same description, and I’m not going to pretend I have a case file for every disputed track that will settle the difference, but I do remember that I was generally making decisions about whole albums and that saving a couple of songs was an exception. I also included a final rule reserving the right to modify any of the rules at any time for any reason, followed by, “I mean, it’s my music, right?” A very serious regulatory body, with a very convenient appeals process.

I had also written in an exemption for the other human beings who had to be around me. If somebody in the car, the office, or at home asked me to stop or play something else, that was allowed, which is reassuring to find in the original document because otherwise this starts sounding like a hostage situation with a surprisingly varied soundtrack. Christmas music got an even more elaborate arrangement: the rules didn’t apply to it, because, and this is the actual explanation I published, “We have to think of the children.” I could take a break from the marathon between November 27 and December 26, during which Christmas music could be played, though it wasn’t mandatory. I had apparently considered the possibility that somebody would interpret my seasonal exception as compulsory Christmas listening and wanted to head that off before it became a constitutional crisis. There were twelve thousand songs to get through, but first I needed to clarify the jurisdiction of Santa.

My coworker Eric Tuininga remembered the project when we were talking on LinkedIn much later, and his description gives you a view of it from the other side of my desk: “I fondly remember your slightly absurd project of listening through your entire iTunes library alphabetically. One never knew what might be playing if you stopped by Adam’s desk.” “Slightly absurd” is kind of him. I was working at The City then, and while I was moving through this enormous private list, the people around me were encountering whatever particular piece of it happened to be playing when they came over. I like that he remembered it, because from inside the project I was keeping track of where I was and what needed to go, and from outside it I was the guy whose desk might sound completely different the next time you stopped by. The office had an ongoing music experiment in it, and I was both the person conducting it and the person who had to keep listening.

The tweets let us watch it crawl forward without requiring me to remember thirteen months of track listings, which is good because I absolutely do not. On September 25 I was still in the A’s with Tom Waits’ Alice, and by late October I had deleted 170 songs. June 15, 2010, found me in the T’s, which means this thing had traveled through Christmas, the beginning of a new year, and most of spring before I got there. In August, Where Meager Die of Self Interest came up, and then finally we arrive at our random September day with me announcing the last album in Z. Except, of course, getting to Z didn’t actually mean I was finished, because there were still numbers and records with no names or strange names waiting after the alphabet. Even my finish line had a miscellaneous folder.

That same September day also preserves a small Joanna Newsom moment: “After listening to Joanna Newsom’s Ys album for the 3rd time, I ask myself why haven’t I listened to her more. There’s so much going on.” I like having that there, because it catches me enjoying something while all this sorting and judging was happening, and it gives the project a little sound without me having to manufacture a scene around it. When asked now whether there was a particular album that surprised me, either something I expected to throw out and ended up loving or something I thought I liked until I actually sat through it, my answer was that there were too many to remember this far away from the project. That’s where the memory stops. I can show you what I said about Ys that day; I can’t hand you a definitive ranking of the great revelations of the purge, and I don’t think the story needs me to invent one.

It took another six weeks to get from “really close to being done” to actually being done, which is a useful reminder to be suspicious whenever I use the word “close” about a project. On October 16, 2010, I was down to twenty-seven more songs, and then came the announcement: “As of 1:59 I have listened to every album and song in my iTunes library. I started on September 20 2009. 9836 songs kept, 3095 deleted. #fb” There it is. The end of the list, with a time and a count, because I was apparently willing to leave the emotional details to posterity but made sure the bookkeeping was in order. Nine thousand eight hundred thirty-six songs kept, three thousand ninety-five deleted, adding up to exactly 12,931, the number I had written down when I started. I love that the numbers meet back up after all that time. I finished the fucking thing.

Now, when we were talking about this, I said, “But don’t worry, dear readers, most things made the cut,” and described very few things going to “ye olde chopping blocke,” which is how it feels in my memory. The final count puts a useful number beside that feeling: about 24 percent of the songs went away. Most did survive, but three thousand ninety-five songs is still a substantial pile of little digital heads. We don’t have a final count of deleted albums, so I’m not going to pretend the song percentage tells us exactly how many whole records were sentenced, but the cleanup certainly did some cleaning. I had listened through the collection and taken out nearly a quarter of its songs, while leaving myself almost ten thousand to enjoy afterward, which seems like plenty until you remember who’s doing the collecting.

From September 20, 2009, to October 16, 2010, was 391 days. A year and twenty-six days. When we worked that out, my response was basically, it took how long‽ I don’t remember what I did to celebrate, although I’m sure I celebrated, and I can’t tell you whether there was an announcement around the office or whether the tweet was the entirety of my closing ceremony. What I do remember is the accomplishment: “I had committed to the process completely. I was happy to be done with it and have a clean library.” That still feels like the right description. I had given myself a ridiculous job, kept doing it for over a year, and reached the end with the thing I wanted when I started. In a tweet the following year, I called it cathartic, so that part has survived in both the old account and the current memory. I don’t have to remember what I played next to remember that it felt good to be finished.

You might imagine that this experience transformed me into somebody who maintained a carefully controlled music library forever afterward, admitting each new recording only after a thorough examination of its merits, and I would like to give you a moment to enjoy that lovely idea before I tell you about Archive.org. I found a whole bunch of old 78s that had been digitized and uploaded there, figured out how to download pages at a time, and then proceeded to do exactly the sort of thing a person does when the exciting discovery is that he can download pages at a time. Oh, it got messy again real good. There is so much old-timey music in my library now that I’m never going to get rid of, and I know perfectly well how funny that is after spending 391 days making myself listen to everything I had already accumulated. Apparently I am very committed to cleaning up my music, right up until somebody presents me with a great deal more music.

The nice part is that the old library is still with me too. I still have those old files in Apple Music, carried forward through iTunes Match, which I called “Music Match or whatever it’s called” when we were talking about it, because remembering the name of the service is clearly less important to me than the fact that it kept my music around. So this isn’t only a story about a collection I once had on a computer that went away; the music I kept has come along into the present, where it now has to share space with all those 78s I deliberately brought home. I am still pleased that I finished the project, and I am still pleased that I figured out how to get all that old-timey music, and I don’t feel particularly compelled to make those two satisfactions agree with each other. The library was clean. I remember being happy about it. Then I found more music, and I was happy about that too, and if the alphabet has a problem with it, I refer it to rule six. It’s my music, right?