Having driven four hours to see them last time, undertaking a one-hour jaunt to catch the Baseball Project was a no-brainer. That first show was so good, it still ranks among my favorite shows two years later.

Last night, the Baseball Project added another show to that list. Improbable as it may seem for someone who has only a passing interest in baseball (the fact that current coverage of my favorite team boasts headlines like “What has happened to the Dodgers?” doesn’t help), I love this band.

Most of that affection comes because of my being a big fan of its two principles: Steve Wynn and Scott McCaughey. I’ve been a fan of McCaughey’s longer, having picked up my first Young Fresh Fellows LP back in ’86, but I’ve become a huge fan of Wynn’s over the past decade. The two together, augmented by the stoic Peter Buck (playing bass in a busman’s holiday of sorts from his other band) and the comely Linda Pitmon (that’s Mrs. Wynn to you), are dynamite. These may be songs about baseball, but they are Wynn and McCaughey songs first, and the tunes found on the band’s two platters (three when you count the limited Broadside Ballads collection) are among the best work either has done.

Thursday night at the Rock Island Brewing Co. in Rock Island, Ill., the band faced a line-up change: Peter Buck was out (benched? on the DL?), and his R.E.M. compatriot Mike Mills was in. Casting no aspersions on Buck, one of my favorite musicians of the past 30 years, Mills more than held his own. Playing his natural instrument (while guitarist Buck is not) and contributing those trademark high harmonies (where Buck doesn’t sing a lick), he brought an added dimension to the sound. Couple that with the addition of a keyboard player this time out, and this was even more musically satisfying than the last time out.

The band stuck to its two officially released albums at the start, opening with “Past Time” from Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails. They also tore through “Ted Fucking Williams,” “Gratitude (For Curt Flood),” “Broken Man,” “Jackie’s Lament,” and “Harvey Haddix” from that first album. The second album, High and Inside, yielded “1976,” “Panda and the Freak,” “Fair Weather Fans” (with a new verse from Mills to sub for Buck’s deadpan shout-out to the Washington Senators), “Don’t Call Them Twinkies,” “Chin Music,” “Ichiro Goes to the Moon” and “The Straw That Stirs the Drink.”

McCaughey only fronted one non-Baseball Project song, ripping through the Minus 5 romp “Aw Shit, Man!” Two, if you count the impromptu cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” that came between the set and the encore (“I’m not going off stage,” McCaughey said. “It’s too much work.”). Wynn, in contrast, had a lot more mic time, doing the Dream Syndicate classics “That’s What You Always Say” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” as well as his solo track “Amphetamine.”

The best crowd response, however, came for the millionaire among us. Mills opened the encore with a spirited version of R.E.M.’s “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville.” The band seemed to be having a lot of fun on the classic, and it was fun to see Mills play the song in the kind of clubs his band left behind a long time ago.

The band stuck around after the show to chat and sign things, and we had long discussions about music, baseball and the incredible response to the band. McCaughey engaged in some analysis of the band members’ first-pitch performance at a number of major and minor league ballgames, and marveled at the spread afforded the band in a luxury suite at three consecutive Milwaukee Brewers games. They’re among the nicest people in rock, and deserve whatever success — or meat and cheese trays — that brings.

So, a year ago, I decided to start keeping track of every full album I listened to. I did this in part as justification for my still-insatiable desire to acquire new music decades after my first purchase, and in part to simply help me to see if my actual listening was as broad as my self-image indicates.

The results were interesting. Over the course of an entire year, I listened to 732 full albums. That equates to 61 a month, or almost exactly two per day. That last figure is a bit misleading, as I would often go a day or two without listening to anything all the way through, while other days spent chained to the computer at work would find me spinning five or six.

I set ground rules: These needed to be albums, not EPs or singles. I needed to listen to them in whole. And once something was heard, it couldn’t be listed again, no matter how many repeat plays. So, while I listened to well over 8,000 songs in this exercise, the total is likely double that or more, as hours and hours spent with the iPod on shuffle, repeat listens of favorite discs and partial spins all were omitted from the total.

The most interesting thing I found is that I changed my listening habits because of this exercise. I’m often chided for not listening to things all the way through, often surprised when listening to old discs while distracted by other things to find an uncredited bonus track at the end or some other unknown treasure toward the end of the tracklist. Because I couldn’t record the album on the list unless I heard the whole thing, I forced myself to hear every last note.

I also listened to a lot more new music than I might have otherwise. There were few albums in the past year that earned a rave review anywhere (and that sounded like they would remotely fall in my musical wheelhouse) that I didn’t track down some way and hear. That expanded my palette, as I found myself embracing much more electronic music than ever before, but also led me to confirm the long-held belief that while an awful lot of of well-reviewed music might offer immediate visceral pleasure, they are lacking in the long run and rarely demand a repeat spin.

I set a goal at the beginning of this calendar year to listen to more classical music, hoping to move from completely ignorant to marginally knowledgeable of the genre’s best works. I did better given that concerted effort than I have in the past, but with only 18 classical collections having been played (though, in my defense, some were multi-disc sets), I have a long way to go.

A look at what I listened to the most meshes pretty well with a list of my favorite artists. Push comes to shove, a list of what I would have expected to listen to the most created at the beginning of this exercise would look a lot like the actual result… with a couple of exceptions. First the list:

That’s the top 10. I keep a blog about Robert Pollard’s music, and that coupled with the fact that he puts out 5 or 6 albums a year means he’ll probably always top this list. I’m a huge fan of Crowded House, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub and Big Star, so those make sense. I got on a serious Steve Wynn kick last year that continues unabated. The Beatles boxed set accounts for their presence here, while reading the 33 1/3 series book on the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime helps explain their spot. Devo and Richard Thompson were both driven by live shows. However, I hadn’t listened to Devo in years before pulling them out in July, so their strong showing is pretty remarkable. I’m always listening to Thompson, so that’s no surprise.

My year came to a close on July 31. When Aug. 1 rolled around, I listened to a CD and then headed to the computer to record it. A funny thing happened, however; I decided to let it go. I have been listening to things at pretty much the same pace I did before, but in just a few days, I find I’m already more willing to listen to a handful of songs and then swap something out if it’s not working for me. If I can maintain the adventurousness and patience afforded by the exercise while injecting some much-needed flexibility, my listening experience is sure to improve.

The progress reports from the Baseball Project camp have been disappointing in only one respect: we’ll have to wait until 2011 to hear the crack of the musical bat… or will we?

The group — Scott McCaughey (The Minus 5, R.E.M., Young Fresh Fellows), Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate, Gutterball, Miracle 3), Linda Pitmon (Miracle 3, Golden Smog) and Peter Buck (R.E.M.) — is working on the official followup to Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, which isn’t scheduled until next year. However, the foursome recently announced that they would be doing some musical baseball blogging, so to speak, writing, recording and releasing in quick succession a series of songs during the coming big league baseball season, dubbed Broadside Ballads.

“The band will be providing tuneful commentary on baseball events big and small, recording them in magical bi-coastal fashion (Linda and Steve in New York City, Scott and Peter in Portland and Seattle, respectively) and putting them up online while the ink is still wet,” they report on Steve Wynn’s web site.

The first track already is available: “All Future and No Past.” Written by Scott McCaughey, it deals with the fact that before the first pitch is tossed, every team is full of promise. “I’d been reading all the pre-season reports and realizing that this is the time of year when every team has high hopes, no matter how unrealistic. Then I stumbled upon a saying from the great Indians player/manager Lou Boudreau: ‘On opening day, the world is all future and no past’. And for me that really sums up the beautiful feeling that comes with spring training each year.”

Wynn reports that the song was “written, recorded and mixed in Portland and New York City, all in the space of about a week, setting a template for regular dispatches throughout the season.”

The songs will be available on ESPN’s “The Life” section. The second song, already in the can, will be released in April around opening day.

“I think it will be a lot of fun just to kind of see what’s going on and get fired up about something,” Wynn writes on his blog. “And instead of just writing bemused e-mails to each other, we’ll put chords behind it and call it a song.”

I have been remiss about getting this interview with Steve Wynn posted because I’ve been doing things like… traveling to see Steve Wynn. So, I’ll wrap a review of Wynn’s recent Baseball Project show in Chicago in with this short Q&A about his new self-released CD, Steve Sings Bob.

First up, the Baseball Project. The show was a triple bill, with the BP, the Steve Wynn IV and the Minus 5. However, it was all the same band, with Wynn on guitar and vox, Scott McCaughey also on guitar and vocals, Peter Buck on bass and Linda Pitmon (Wynn’s wife and drummer in the Miracle 3) on drums. They decided to play one big show rather than separate band sets, and that was a wise choice. They opened with the Dream Syndicate’s “That’s What You Always Say,” which set a nice tone: laid back but with blisteringly good guitars. From there it was a mix of tunes from Wynn’s latest, disc, Crossing Dragon Bridge (“Manhattan Fault Line”) Dream Syndicate (a scorching “Medicine Show” and “Days of Wine and Roses”) and even Gutterball (“Trial Separation Blues.”) The first hour-long set closed with “Amphetamine,” which was so good I feared the second set couldn’t top it. Yes, there was some fall off, but not much as, McCaughey dominated that set with a sprinkling of Minus 5 tunes new and old.

The Baseball Project songs were the highlight of the night. “Harvey Haddix” got an update to include Mark Buehrle’s recent perfect game (with a nice, harmonious bridge to note his accomplishment), while “Past Time” smoked and “The Yankee Flipper” had a few heartier souls in the crowd saluting with their middle fingers raised high. A new Baseball Project song was debuted, “Tony,” which tells of player Tony Conigliaro, who was hit by a pitch in the eye.

All in all it was a fantastic show that reaffirmed my fandom of everyone involved. Strangest was seeing multimillionaire Peter Buck quietly playing bass on stage in a small bar. He’s surely the richest person to set foot on that stage, which is testament to how much he must love playing live.

The band pulled out one cover: Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues,” passing on the chance to cover Bob Dylan and give me a less clunky segue into my interview with Wynn. Oh well.

Wynn has performed several Dylan songs over the years, and recently decided to gather a bunch of them on CD. The result, Steve Sings Bob, is a limited-edition (of 300) collection of Dylan covers from 1982 to present. Most are live, some more polished than others, but all are good and fully fitting the spirit of the material. In the liner notes on his site, Wynn shares one interesting story about “Blind Willie McTell.” It was recorded by the latter-day Dream Syndicate in 1988 on a radio show, and released on a Bucketful of Brains magazine flexi the next year, “marking the first time the song had officially seen the light of day, a few years before Dylan’s version was released on the first of his bootleg series. We even had to get the permission of his publishing staff to put out our version before he did.”

The tracklist:

1. Blind Willie McTell (The Dream Syndicate)
2. Positively 4th Street (Steve Wynn and Loose Change)
3. Watching The River Flow (Steve Wynn and Friends)
4. Honest With Me (Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3)
5. Knockin’ On Heavens Door (Steve Wynn with the Alejandro Escovedo Band)
6. All Along The Watchtower (The Dream Syndicate)
7. Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar (Steve Wynn Quintet)
8. Outlaw Blues (The Dream Syndicate)
9. Gotta Serve Somebody (Hazel Motes)
10. Like A Rolling Stone (Steve Wynn and Jason Victor)

I asked Wynn a few questions about the project, and he graciously responded, “from the middle of a van rolling across northern Washington….”

TIRBD: You’ve done a few covers here and there, but nothing to compare with the number of Dylan songs you’ve done. What is the appeal of his music from an interpreter’s standpoint?

SW: Well, the most obvious answer is that he’s a great songwriter with an incredible catalog of amazing songs. But, beyond that, the songs are usually easy to learn and leave a lot of room for interpretation (witness his own wide varieties of takes on his own material over the years). It’s also a common language for musicians — almost everyone loves at least one period of Dylan or another so it’s easy to name a song when you’re looking for a quick cover and know that there HAS to be one Dylan song in common between the various memory banks of the guys on stage.

What challenges do you face when tackling Dylan’s work?

That’s easy: remembering the words. Every song has at least 5 or 6 verses. I was joking to the band before our Italian show (Steve Sings Bob in Ravenna last month) that they had the easy job. And it’s true. You can learn the music on the spot but it’s not easy to fake the lyrics. Fortunately, so many of his songs are firmly embedded in my DNA.

Were there songs you’ve done that you wanted to include where you couldn’t find a decent recording?

Not really. In fact, my favorite song on the CD was the version of “Gotta Serve Somebody” that I recorded with my “punk gospel” band Hazel Motes. And that version is VERY lo-fi, just an audience recording.

Is there a favorite Dylan song that you don’t feel you can pull off?

I really wanted to do “Highlands.” All 18 minutes of it. And I will definitely do it one day. But I’ll need a teleprompter or a music stand.