Get High & Listen To Radiohead's In Rainbows

That's my plan for the day. In Rainbows was released today (at least the download version) and I've already got it on my computer. I bought the disc box version so I'll be getting a CD and a double LP version as well sent to my house... They said that bit is sent by December 3. I'm being very careful right now not to read anybody's "first thoughts" about In Rainbows. I want to go into listening it as a true virgin.

I think that's one of the really exciting things about the way they have released this new album. People all over the world are truly hearing it for the first time ... at basically the same time. This is a bit of the magic that people used to get from an album's release but that was "ruined" by downloading. Radiohead has shown with this that it's not ruined at all by downloading. You just have to go about things differently. It makes me cringe when I hear aging hipsters (and I'm aging myself here...) talk about how it "used to be" and all of this. If you're in your 30s you should be spending less time being nostalgic and more time doing something NOW. I'm tired of nostalgia, I want new and exciting.

I love Radiohead and would be excited to hear this album even if I was getting it in leaked form (which is surely how I would have been hearing it if it had been released through the normal methods) ... But I think it's so much more exciting to hear it in this way... In the same way so many others are hearing it today.

Oh yeah. And there's the whole thing about how you can set your own price for the album, that you can pay any amount you want to for it. That's extremely cool. The whole thing is actually marketing genius in a way (They might cringe to think of people thinking of it that way, I'm not sure...) as it has got lots of people talking about the album and I think will get more people listening to the album than otherwise would have. And since Radiohead is such an incredibly good band, the more people that hear them the better for them long term. More people at their shows and more people buying their albums and spreading their music around to their friends and so on.

I'll be giving my first thoughts on the album later on today after I've heard it... And then I will go around and see what other people think about it too. But I want my first experience to be virginal. Dig? I most certainly dig it myself.

I haven't been this excited to hear a new album in a long time. Perhaps since Kid A.