For those of you who happily listen to your music in “shuffle” mode, this post should mean very little. For those who listen through the albums in the order in which they came on the CD, and who have organized their playlists in a particular order of albums, this post may not mean anything unless you use music as I do. Yes. Music, for me, has a very distinct use: blocking out the external world so that I can focus.
Don’t get me wrong: I love music, and happily listen to the radio (although I do object when, say, we transition from Sibelius’ Finlandia to the theme song from The Big Valley, which happened just Wednesday afternoon). But when I’m at work, I need something which is consistent, and which I’ve listened to so many times that the next song isn’t any surprise. The music all needs to be of a fairly high energy – to get the fingers flying over the keyboard – and the albums must come in the same order, which my player kindly does by default. The order in which I place the albums is the order in which they’re played, and I typically array the music out from happy pop music (Lenka, the Cranberries), through darker pop music (10,000 Maniacs, Tori Amos, Sinead O’Connor), and then conclude with the hard stuff (Metallica and Paris, Sonic Jihad). Lenka just recently supplanted The Cranberries as the lead album, as she’s a new addition to our music collection.
I don’t always start at the beginning, and I usually don’t make it all the way through because I’ll have had a particular mood which suited me for that day’s work. Yesterday, however, I began with Metallica, carried through Paris … and got the shock of my life when everything rolled over to Lenka. It was truly, truly horrible. I actually had to pull out the headphones and tell T. about it, it was so startling, and then roll back the playlist to Pearl Jam (comes before Metallica). After a few times through Pearl Jam, I could work my way back, and reconsider Lenka, but it was tough.
Music gets into your brain, folks. Very far into your brain.
-D
An Isis/Cocteau Twins mix always worked for me! 🙂 But I really like the idea of the Sibelius/Big Valley juxtaposition.
Hmm, I wish sometimes that I had fewer topic-specific blogs because I could wax poetic for hours about how I listen to music!!
Sometimes when I just want random, I’ll listen alphabetically by track name. That can get pretty crazy, but backfires when you have five versions of one song.
These days though, I subscribe to Rhapsody and create an intentional queue of specific albums there, so I’m not being surprised very often.
Can you stream? radioparadise.com. Try it if you can. He rarely goes off the deep end, finds great new music regularly, and is an amazing DJ.
That is a rather eclectic play list! But I do know exactly what you mean. I generally listen to music in the same way for the same reason, but will sometimes really mix things up with varying results. I wonder if the need to listen to albums in their order of appearance comes from listening to records and cassettes?