Man, the D’s started out so well and with such promise.

Within their first day and not even listening all that actively, I had already identified nine songs that I couldn’t wait to pick my way through a few more times, one that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t played all the dopamine out of years ago, and tons of fodder for the playlist enshrining all the second-chance songs this project gave me. Being immediately greeted by so much to love was a really inviting introduction to a new letter after I plodded through the C’s (by no fault of their own). And stretches of them, too!

And it still took more than half a year to get through one letter because I’d forgotten how much time a demanding job that I actually enjoy eats up. (Also, having been back in the office since July has both effectively obliterated the quarantine’s generous gift of Writing for Me time and absolutely decimated the habitual 10 hours of music every working day yielded.) (And I guess veering hard into a lengthy detour through the new Modest Mouse album didn’t help, either.)

But the inadvertent absences and longer stretches of time between being able to take ample alphabetical bites out of my iPod just made coming back to it more fun and more of a thing I wanted to do so much that I actually made the time for it, which is exactly why all the restocked me-time of working from home this month immediately went into 12,7000 Songs. And there was a lot of fun to be had in the D’s! Holy shit, there were some delightful quirks of alphabetical order and couldn’t-have-planned-it-if-I-tried timing at play here.

There was the utterly delightful sequence of “Dig” songs that were all over the place, with not one common sound between them beyond a shared catchiness conducting a cacophony of charm. Like… c’mon, this is one helluva whiplash-inducing meeting of genres:

You’ve got leadoff hitter Fanfarlo‘s orchestral folk-rock smashing right into That 1 Guy and whatever musical equivalent of dazzling avant-garde impressionism his art wrung from homemade instruments is. Then in the middle of a Beatles sandwich you get the Eastern European polka-cabaret of Gogol Bordello before riding out a wave of Modest Mouse‘s usual flavor of wonderful weirdness cresting Nick Cave’s biblically inspired tale all dressed up in spoken-word flourish and a lounge suit. Absolutely none of it goes together but they all came together for 19.3 minutes of the most uninterrupted fun this project has given me so far.

There was October’s timely delight of getting some spooky-season-appropriate tunes all lumped together at once, with special appearances from some reimagined classic monsters, like World Inferno‘s Dr. Dracula (Who Makes You Get High!), Parliament’s Dr. Funkenstein and “Dracula’s Lament,” from the Taste for Love Dracula musical glimpsed in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which my husband and I have watched a thousand times and the soundtrack for which we once listened to with a shared a pair of headphones as we cackled our way through a train ride home from an early-year anniversary NYC adventure.

And there was a veritable onslaught of variations on the same songs with Dave Matthew Band’s “Dancing Nancies” (five versions at 38.2 minutes), Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” (eight versions at 1.8 hours), “Don’t Dream It’s Over” (three versions at 13.9 minutes), which was immediately followed by DMB’s “Don’t Drink the Water” (four versions at 35.6 minutes), and then DMB one last time with “The Dreaming Tree” (three versions, 37.4 minutes).

What can I say: Developing a formative-years fondness for jam bands and the way they let live songs develop however they’re meant to grow means that spending a literal hour with the same song isn’t nearly as tedious as it maybe would be if I had a normal brain. I usually listen to each song at least twice (once on my iPod, once on Spotify), doubling each of those total playtimes. What should have been an endurance test slogging through so many of the same songs was a victory lap, retrospectively proving that Younger Me was right every time I stubbornly insisted how malleable and always-evolving live versions of songs are. From incorporating the name of where you’re playing into the song or realizing time again how shockingly non-gratuitous lengthy guitar solos can be when they’re always a little different is a beautiful lesson in how you never experience the same river twice.

While each song gets at least two listens, some get more because I’ll retrace my steps if I feel like I spaced out for a string of songs (or if I just really enjoy a certain cluster, even if it’s just a pair of sequential songs like Ed Harcourt’s catchy-as-fuck “Do as I Say Not as I Do” (Song No. 2,600) preceding Spoon’s also-catchy-as-fuck “Do I Have to Talk You Into It” (Song No. 2,601). D felt like the letter I was retracing my steps the most in because the songs were either SO! FUCKING! AWESOME! or were the most likely to fade into background noise because I was paying attention to five other things as they played.

I wound up going back to the De’s almost two months later because I felt like I’d missed so many songs after the Da’s started out so strong and compelling. And I’m really glad I did because there’s a lot of good songs I almost missed again, and I was able to flesh out a section that deserved a heckuva lot more attention than I gave it the first time.

But I am so ready to get started on a new letter after spending more than half a year on this one. I’ve got one more wrap-up planned now that the first 20ish percent of the titular 12,700 songs are done, but here’s some quick stats in the meantime:

D Songs
Total: 605 songs
First song “The D in Detroit” by The Anniversary
Last song: “Dying in New Brunswick” by Thursday
Shortest song: “Dig Your Grave” by Modest Mouse (13 seconds)
Longest song: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin [The Song Remains the Same version] (26:52 minutes)
Most recurring song: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin (8 versions total)
Most time spent on one song: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin (1.8 hours)
Number of songs not on Spotify: 32
Total playing time (letter): 1.7 days
Total playing time (cumulative): 8 days