Everything has a day. There’s Record Store Day, obviously. Yesterday was National Hammock Day. Today it’s National Vanilla Ice Cream Day. Tomorrow, National Tequila Day. We’ll be celebrating all three later.
But now Dear Reader, we have a new one: National Album Day, which has been announced for 13th October – apparently the 70th anniversary of the album.
Decreed by a bunch of industry types, it’s described as “the highlight of week-long activity around the country that will celebrate the UK’s love of the album and enable a national conversation around the format”.
Now, granted, to those of us in the church of Dork, this may seem a bit perfunctory – we have conversations around albums pretty much 24/7 – but apparently everyone’s far too bothered about streaming ‘the singles’ from their ‘phones’ now, so we all have to remind ‘the bands’ that we really do love them and their full-lengths full of nine-minute-long ‘important album tracks’.
Because the album is an ‘authentic’ format, those in charge have worked hard to find the perfect ambassador for the event. It turns out that’s Paloma Faith, who says: “I vividly remember being excited by so many classic albums as I was growing up, like Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’, Dylan’s ‘Freewheelin’’, and Erykah Badu’s ‘Mama’s Gun’, although, if I had to pick one, the album that most inspired me was Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut. It featured the incredibly powerful ‘Why?’ – a song that has become a real anthem for me not least as it was the first to bring home the emotional power of lyrics. The way we engage with music may be changing, but for me the album remains the ultimate expression of the songwriter’s craft.”
Nobody ever says that they grew up rinsing ‘Steptacular’, do they? They’re all fibbing.
A press release goes on to add that “the organisers plan to grow National Album Day organically into an annual event so that becomes a keenly anticipated part of the music industry calendar, in much the same way as Record Store Day.”
So, yeah. National Album Day, or NAD for short. That’s a thing now. Obviously, we’ll all be living our National Album Lives.
