Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

In the olden days of newspapers, and I'm talking about decades ago, there was a specific way

of printing photographs. Photos were given to the printer who copied the picture using a special camera

that converted everything to something known as half-tone, so it could be put in the paper.

If you looked really closely at the resulting picture, you'd see that it was made up of a pattern of

dots. Each one was a different size and proportional to the blackness of the original photo

in that particular location on the photograph. Viewed at a distance, it looked like a normal

picture, but if you got up real close, all you saw was the dots. Okay, wait, let's try

something else. Have you ever sat up close to a TV? And I mean really close.

So close that you can see the individual pixels.

That's kind of cool because you get to see the tiniest components of the video that's being

broadcast.

But looking at a pixel or two isn't really helpful when you're actually hoping to understand

anything that's being broadcast.

You're too close.

There's no perspective to anything. Sometimes to really understand things, you need to sit back, and I mean

way back, in order to perceive things, to understand things, to appreciate things, and to

basically figure out why they are the way they are.

In other words, you need the big picture.

All right, to torture this metaphor even more, the same principles can be applied to music

before certain things come into focus.

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