Prince wrote at least one song for Kate Bush (and recorded with?), and I think has been quoted as being a fan.

And I tend to associate Kate with British prog-rock and art-rock, mainly because of Dave Gilmour and the number of Genesis fans I knew in high school who were into her. OTOH, I think of Tori as the musical descendant of Joni Mitchell and the mother of the 1990s female singer-songwriter movement.

I think Tori's influences are split pretty evenly along Joni and Kate lines (with plenty of her own originality). But I think you're right, that in many ways Kate was a fellow traveler with specific British musical streams like prog (Peter Gabriel was an acknowledged influence long before she dueted with him). You're right that Kate has not tended to the confessional - or rather, it's more fair to say that she's cloaked her personal experience in broader metaphors. (I've watched her talking about "Suspended in Gaffa" on a VH-1 Flashback and she's quite interesting and articulate talking about it relating to her Catholic school training about Purgatory.) In a lot of ways, I think Kate is close in spirit to an art-pop group like Sparks or early Split Enz.

This weekend I went down to Fry's and bought a 160GB hard drive and an external HD kit, because I was running low on space for my 11,000 MP3s.

Good Lord, I have 11,000 MP3s -- and I still haven't ripped a third of my music collection.

All this to say that I downloaded the Streets' "A Grand Don't Come For Free" from eMusic. Damn fine album.

I'm sitting at 50.3 days of music right now. 18,265 songs ripped. It's pretty fun once you get that many into the system.

Okay, why did this post briefly say "Array"? 'Twas not what I typed.

I was going to say that I feel like I have "too much" music at 5,600 -- it would be past 6,000 if I didn't delete stuff I didn't like.

Why did this post briefly say "Array" too? That's... creepy. What I meant to say was:

I went over 7000 songs and started to make cuts because I had a lot of stuff just for the sake of having it on my computer, not because I was likely to listen to it any time soon. Volume's fine, but density's where it's at.

For any VM fans (or simply fans of "Eclectic electronic ambient pop"), check out this interview with 46bliss. I think music fans in general would get a kick out of it, honestly. Good stuff about how the band got together, how they record, what their influences are, all that business.

I'm sitting at 50.3 days of music right now. 18,265 songs ripped. It's pretty fun once you get that many into the system.

My problem is "iPod block." I have 9500 songs on the iPod, and it takes me 3-5 minutes every morning to choose the first song of the day, scroll through the system, and find it.

Yeah, I can go "random" and see what comes up, but I never do.

I don't even try to put a big collection on my iPod. I've got a 30 GB model with around 5000 songs on it. I use this library with my work and I have one copy of it on the server in my home and another that lives on a 500 GB Firewire 800 drive. My full collection of sound effects also lives this way (About 150,000 effects) and between the two things I can quickly search and find what I need either in my home studio on with my portable studio on the road.

Array