It appears that I have arrived at the half way point in my challenge of listening to nearly every single album in my vinyl record collection. It falls, neatly enough, at the end of the letter L, just one letter shy of the 13th letter, and the half way mark in the alphabet, which is, last time I checked, the letter M. I thought it might be fun, for me anyway, to do some accounting of the project’s progress thus far. So, here are the current stats as of this day, March 24, 2026, for my A to Z Vinyl Listening Challenge.
- First day of project: October 20, 2025. Number of days since embarkment: 215.
- Reached the end of the letter L: May 23, 2026
- Not by counting but by simply eyeballing the collection, I think I am half way or 50% through the project.
- At the end of the letter F, in total:
- I have composed 169 pieces of writing–poem-like-things or skinny essays.
- I have listened thus far to 152 artists.
- I have listened thus far to 374 total albums.
- I have written 86,730 words as blog entries (poem-like-things or skinny essays). This word count does not include notes on the edition(s) of each vinyl record (title, record label, year of release and/or reissue, color and sometimes gram weight of each specimen), and does not include a message (mostly identical each time, but with variations early on) about what I’m doing: listening to almost everything A-Z and writing a thing for each artist that looks like a poem but that I know is not really a poem. Word count does not include stand-alone prose pieces written during the process from October 2025 to April 8, 2026, titled “We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program…” And of course the word count does not include poems I wrote this April for National Poetry Writing Month or in May that were not about the music collection.
- As of today, I will have accomplished a streak of publishing a blog post 100 days in a row!
- I have 371 manuscript pages when all pieces written so far are archived into a Word document draft of a manuscript currently titled, I Listened To Everything.
There you have it. I must say that I am pretty pleased with myself. I have fulfilled the goals at least partly for embarking on this journey in the first place, and those are to listen more widely in my record collection rather than always favoring the most recent, new, shiny thing, thereby justifying the collection in the first place; and I have fulfilled the goal of writing about the experience with not just a little bit of aplomb. I’ve never written 86,000 words in seven months time before in my entire life on the planet. Of course, the next goal, the one that I have not yet completed, is to finish the project. How long will it take me? Well, if what I have done so far is any indication, another six months, perhaps.
If you have been along for this journey, I heartily thank you. Blogging is a strange thing these days in that I am not always trusting of my readership stats, which have been during this project uncharacteristically good. My trust is flimsy only because I know that my site has in the past been visited by bots, which tend to over-inflate my numbers. The only real way that I know people are reading is when they like a post or comment–so if you have done that, I salute you. I probably would undertake this silly mission even if you were not there–but you being there makes it a vastly more rewarding writing endeavor. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
Here’s one more program note before I sign off. Tomorrow, very early in the morning, I am leaving to attend a writer’s retreat in New Mexico. I may post from that vantage point, but I will be away from home and far away from the record collection, so any posts I make will be unrelated to music listening. If I post at all over the next week, expect to see some reflection about the retreat experience and the other one of my passions: fiction writing. The letter M will have to wait until JUNE! Cheers!
michael jarmer 