Dark Side of the Tunes

I spent a good two hours last night looking through iTunes, listening to samples, perusing artists and genres. Guess what I ended up buying? Nothing. Yep, Two hours of my life I’ll never get back, all because hope springs eternal that I will find more music I like. I seem to be stuck in a rut, listening to older music, soundtracks, and the occasional metal band my child inflicts on me. I don’t even listen to the radio any more, vapid is the word that comes to mind. So where to find new music? Right now I go mainly by recommendations. Music from bands that play at our Celtic Festival – Indulgers, Gobs O’Phun, Men of Worth, Lalla Rookh. Opera rec’s from Gabriele. My anonymous brother has been a good source for folk and bluegrass, my children keep me up to date on metal and rap – although the oldest shares my tastes in Pink Floyd, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and others of that ilk. Kind of scary when you ride in a car with a 17 year old and can agree on the music. And want it louder.

Part of my reluctance to purchase more music is financial; I can’t see paying yet again for Pink Floyd in another media. Luckily I had most of the CD’s and could just load them, but there was a couple disks too scratched to work with, or at least that’s what my computer tells me. How many copies of “Wish You Were Here” or “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” does one person really need? Not to mention the transfer of old laptop files to new laptop went… okay. But if I find the person who decided grouping iTunes folders by whatever weird method they came up with, I shall beat him with a USB cable. The logical person would put all the songs off an album in one file folder. Not so iTunes. If there was a guest singer, or additional musician listed, they go off into a separate file folder, sometimes under the grand title of “compilations”, sometimes under some archaic and Byzantine method I have yet to figure out. I’m sure there’s a box to check/uncheck somewhere to fix it, but I don’t need to work that hard, you know? If I buy an album, it should be ready to play in the order the artists intended. I want to listen, I don’t want to have to do rocket science just to hear some tunes.

That was the iTunes whine for the day, on the bright side; I have a stack of 93 CDs waiting to be ripped. In my copious free time. At least this way, I can eliminate songs I’ll never listen to, and compile things in my own weird way. I’ve made mixes for my iTunes and iPod just for writing. Songs for Writing Battle Scenes, Songs for Background Noise, Foreign Mood-setting Music, podcasts on writing, Escape Pod podcasts for inspiration, Audiobooks of poetry, and instrumentals. Tunes to compose poetry by – which aren’t as fluffy as you would think. Fatboy Slim can be really inspirational. Honest.

In a training module for work, one of the icebreakers the trainer asked was, “What is your favorite song?” Interesting question, because if he asked about books or paintings or even cars, I would have hemmed and hawed and had to consider it at length before coming up with an answer. Not so with music. At least this decade. I had no problem volunteering my answer straight away.

Pink Floyd - "Learning to Fly".

The video is not my vision of it, but hey, I’ll cut the artists some slack. *g* So have you made music collections just for writing? Is there some tunes that get you racing to write that battle scene? Music to Off Bad Guys? Great, sweeping bits to sketch scenery by? Please, share with the class.

What’s YOUR favorite song?

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