For the past few years over at Nine Circles I cobble together a weekly playlist called – fittingly if slightly uninspired – The Nine Circles Playlist. We put together a list of mostly new metal tracks the staff have been listening to over the course of the past week and, since I get all the picks and build the playlist in YouTube, I get to inject a few of my picks up front. But it’s by nature of the site limiting: if this site has shown anything (beyond my inconsistency) it’s that my tastes run far beyond, and maybe is even more prominently removed from metal (don’t worry, I still love it). So since I’m making them anyway, why not do it here, but really focus on the music I love in all its many forms?

Welcome to (Un)Focused Definition, a new weekly playlist.

For years I kept a playlist called “Self Definition” which would contain all my favorite artists and bands, a constantly evolving list I could use when driving or working in place of terrestrial radio, which (I’m sure you already know this) over time had quickly evaporated into a bunch of talking heads shouting and maybe the same 6-8 tracks played every 2-3 hours. I kept adding and adding more bands and albums as I discovered them (one benefit of Apple Music over Spotify is there is no limit to how many songs you can add to a playlist) and soon my Self Definition was topping 11,000 songs – too unwieldy for my tastes. And so “Focused Definition” was born, its intention to be a streamlined, filtered version of the very, very best songs culled from my master playlist.

Then THAT got to around 8,000 songs. You can see where this is going, right?

I deleted everything and started from scratch again. And I’ll gladly admit there’s something calming about creating these lists, sitting for hours with a cup of something (I’ve been off alcohol for about 3 months, so it’s coffee for me) and listening to music for hours, finding and adding and forgetting and suddenly remembering and adding and refining. And like I said, since I’m doing an abbreviated version of it weekly for Nine Circles anyway, why not really indulge my list-building tendencies and really go at with the music I love over here?

So again, welcome to (Un)Focused Definition.

Each week I’m going to select about an hour’s worth of music from my collection and post a weekly playlist here for you to check out and enjoy. It’s my quiet version of what Henry Rollins does for far more people with his fantastic KCRW show. For now I’m going to provide two formats: YouTube (you may have already noticed that embed above) and Spotify since it seems a lot of folks subscribe to that. If not I think you can at least hear previews of the songs. If there’s a preferred format you’d like to have it in and it’s within my ability to do so, let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. These will be pretty brief in terms of context, but we’ll see where that goes – I can’t help but provide a little commentary, you know?

But for today we’ll leave the commentary aside and kick off Episode 0 – An (Un)Focused Primer: