I normally don’t care for those chain letters that come around by email, the ones where you’re supposed to answer a bunch of questions then send the letter on to a bunch of people you know. I’ve seen one, though, that I like because it’s short and it’s about music. So here goes:

Total volume of music on my computer:
iTunes says 5547 songs, 17.3 days, 29.78 GB, which includes many, many compact discs I’ve ripped and encoded, plus all my music downloads. Unfortunately, my iPod only holds 20 GB.

The last CD I bought:
The last CD I bought was a Neil Young disc, but that was over a year ago. I get most of my music from iTMS and allofmp3 these days. The last complete album I downloaded was either Los Lonely Boys, “Easter” by Patti Smith, or “Ooh La La” by Faces. I’m not sure which.

Song playing right now:
“Long Train Runnin’” by the Doobie Brothers is playing on the mental jukebox.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Well, the Auburn fight song means a lot to me, especially when it’s played after scoring a touchdown against Alabama, but I don’t think this question is about fight songs. Eliminating that wonderful tune still leaves a lot of great music, and I’m supposed to pick just five? Ok, here goes:

• “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers. Just love that long double guitar solo.
   
• “Frozen Love” by Buckingham-Nicks. Best Fleetwood Mac tune you’ve never heard.
   
• “Where Are You Tonight” by Bob Dylan
   
• “A Man Out of Time” by Elvis Costello. Can it really be over twenty years since the last good Costello record?
   
• “Strange Transmissions” by Norah Jones and the Peter Malick Group. Cool tune.
   
• “Breathe (2AM)” by Anna Nalick. I listened to this tune a lot when it was the free iTMS
  selection a few months back. We’ll find out if the rest of the album measures up, because I’m downloading it now from iTMS.

That’s an interesting question. If it asked something like “What are your five favorite songs?” then none of these would make the list except maybe, just maybe, “Frozen Love”. And yeah, I know I listed six songs… so sue me. Five songs is just way too few. What about “Sweet Home Alabama?” What about “Telegraph Road?” What about “Heard It Through the Grapevine?” What about… oh, well, you get the point.

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
I only know two people who might answer this:

• Joy Chappell Barnes, clarinetist and pianist, whose dad was a great guitarist, and who regularly extolls the wonders of Bob Dylan and the dangers of the Grapefruit Dead.
   
• Matt Barry. Great keyboard musician with varied and eclectic taste in music.

By the way, I just replayed Anna Nalick’s “Breathe” and Wendy stuck her head in the door to say “Who is this?” She and Summer have been hearing it on the radio lately and they both like it. Imagine that - a song that three out of four people in this house like. Is it possible we could ever discover a song that all four of us like? I kind of doubt it. Oh well, there’s always the Auburn fight song.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.