Shuffle

Once in a while I like to make a new playlist for myself. Really, being a commuter, I need some new sounds fairly frequently.

This, of course, means that I wrack up a lot of playlists after a while... Not that that has happened yet, I've only just started listening to playlists recently, but already there are a few.

I recently made two, one titled :(, the other :#...

I was going for a mood...

The art of creating a playlist isn't really an art. It's simple: If you know what the listener wants to hear, give it to them... and slowly broaden the horizon.

I don't make lists for other people very often, but these two recent playlists were made for someone else. I love sharing music, I love passing it on, seeing what someone else thinks when they listen, what it reminds them of...

And yet, when I'm sitting in my music class hearing these same things, I can't stand the "fluffy" words (as someone so rightfully put it). I can't stand hearing people say "It feels like the player is mourning" or some bullshit like that.

I don't want to hear that. I want smells. I want to hear "This reminds me of this one time I was driving to my friends house out in the country, and it was foggy, and all I could smell was manure, but it was nice".

I want to hear that.

I want to collect those sorts of inferences. 

So when it comes to sharing music, I can be a little... surprising to some people. Well, anyone who gets a CD will find a surprise or two in there, usually just from a band they've never listened to before. It happens.

What catches people off guard is why I choose a song.

For instance, my friend Nick asked me a while ago to make a list of songs that reminded me of winter. To this request, I had to explain that some songs on there would resemble summer songs more (simply for their lyrics), but they reminded me of winter because of the timing of the first time I heard that song, or got into that song.

For instance, what does the song "Black" by Pearl Jam have to do with winter? or "look at me" by John Lennon? Neither of these songs are about winter, there's no winter scenery in them, and yet these sorts of songs fill up that playlist. All but perhaps four of the forty-six songs in that list have nothing to do with winter. But they remind me of a cold time, a blue time, an empty time.

I have a large music collection, about 11,000 songs, and it spans a few genres, to say the least... but frequently, my playlists don't suffice, they don't carry me through the subway ride, and I end up searching through the artists (all 1176 of them) to find the right tone.

In the end, when I'm desperate, I put the entire collection on shuffle.

I like drawing parallels between one simple habit to another larger picture. I do that. I look for metaphors. So lately I've been paying attention to my music habits, why I impulsively download (oops, I mean BUY) an artists entire catalogue... when I probably won't hear all those songs. Sure, with the Beatles I've listened to them all, but that's only a couple hundred songs. Nuthin. What about the other guys? Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell (I admit, I have all her albums and then some, but only listen to "blue", "Ladies of the Canyon" and "Shine"), John Lennon (I love him... so I'm working on it) and Paul McCartney (I'm never going to listen to his "symphony")? what about them?

Pack Rat - obsessive collector - what else?

And in the end, I shuffle it up anyway? I create a mess of all these things I've gathered...

It's an idea I play with. But to return to the start of this post, I do enjoy making playlists. They get long (come on, that many songs, how could I make a short list?), so it can overwhelm people into not listening at all... but I make them.

Ever seen the movie "High Fidelity?"