Nina steals Dylan’s blog

1. Are you playing? Dylan hasn’t played out in about 3 years. I think his last show was at The Walker or the Art Institute.
2. Are you planning to play again? Currently he doesn’t have any plans to play out, although there have been internal rumblings about wanting to do some sort of music again.
3. Is Dylan Hicks your real name? Someone did actually ask him this once, and he answered “No, Johnny Rocket was my real name, but I changed it to Dylan Hicks because it wasn’t rock and roll enough.”
4. Did you make any money as a musician? Dylan likes to describe it as a moderately popular non-profit rock band. 
5. Where can I find your albums? There were three CD’s, Won, Poughkeepsie, and Alive with Pleasure. They are currently out of print, but you can usually find them used on Amazon. I keep thinking about posting the files online, but he prefers the idea of solid objects. The same reason we have a really big record library.
6. Why all these questions about music, I thought you were a writer? That too, plus he paints pictures, although they are often mistaken for ones by our kid. Actually Dylan wanted to be a music critic when he was a kid, and was sidelined into performing for awhile.

1. You have a lot of records, do you have a filing system?

Dylan answered this in an earlier post: Dewey Decimal System. Not really, but I do categorize them by genre and alphabetize the respective sections. I’ve thought about going straight alphabetical and ridding myself of the occasional taxonomical headache, but I generally enjoy deciding where to file stuff. The sections, which frequently are umbrella sections, are as follows:

Classical
Traditional American Mainstream Pop/Easy Listening/Polka
Jazz
Blues
Country/Folk
R&B
Rock/Post-Rock Pop
Showtunes/Soundtracks
International (subdivided by country or region)
Latin
Christmas
Gospel
Comedy
People Talking But Not Necessarily Telling Jokes
Hip Hop
Post-Disco Dance Music (disco generally I put in R&B, sometimes in rock/pop)

I worked at Musicland stores for a long time, which experience has influenced my categorization methods. I’m most interested in placing something where I think a guest would be most likely to look for it, if for instance a guest were trying to pick something to play at a dinner party during which I had surrendered control of the stereo, which I wouldn’t. So I file Neko Case in Rock/Pop because her audience is essentially a rock crowd, even if her music sounds more country-ish than Shania Twain, whom I file in country. But then again I put folk (traditional and contemporary, and by “folk” I basically mean white people with stringed instruments, though of course other folk music turns up in International, Blues, and elsewhere) in with country and don’t both giving bluegrass its own section ’cause there’s too much overlap for me to bother with. M.I.A I put in rock/pop rather than Post-Disco Dance or Hip Hop. I put Lisa Stansfield in R&B, but Hall & Oates I put in rock. John Zorn I put in jazz. Ray Charles I put in R&B. If someone makes a gospel record but did not begin as a gospel recording artist, their gospel record goes with the rest of their records. But if they began a gospel recording artist and then went pop, they get to have records in two sections.