afordrunning

I’ve been making my own quarterly playlists for the last 3 years. It’s really quite simple, just start the month with a few songs – maybe even a recent addition from the previous quarter and start building the playlist. It evolves  as you discover new music, your needs for tunes shifts, and your ability to spend a little time with your favorite musical playlists/device.

Really have enjoyed the last few weeks of tooling through the playlists and being able to clearly differentiate my moods according to the tunes of the time. For instance, the 2nd Quarter of 2008 I had a lot of Buck Owens, Jamie Lidell, and Paul Simon – the very next quarter had lot’s of rap and rock and roll. I went from easy and comfortable to hard and fast.

I can’t wait to look back over these lists over the next five years and uncover where I have come from – and see where my musical tastes have evolved. How do you use your musical playlists…and could you look at your “Most Played” right now and set out the Soundtrack of your life?

My new latest favorite artist is Dan Reeder. He’s got some great songs, some off-color songs, and frankly his stuff just sounds original. No matter how late to the party I am it’s good stuff.

For one of my favs check out this youtube vid “You’ll Never Surf Again.”

Remember the Golden Age of Midgetry? Just kidding, there was no Golden Age of Midgetry…and as great as that would have been it still wouldn’t have been as cool as the Golden Age of the Boombox! When I was a kid the bigger a boombox was the cooler the party was going to be.  I knew some guys who had to sell their souls to get a bigger boombox…and now they are partially deaf souls who still have those same boxes blaring AC/DC, or BDP.

Myself, I never owned a boombox but I did have the “Music Box Dancer” on LP. Even as a child my manliness was overwhelming.

What I did have however was a buddy who had one of those boxes with a black and white TV in it. It sucked as a boombox and only got crappy snow for the TV. I guess if you lived RIGHT NEXT to the station’s tower you could pick up a faint outline of an image on the set. The upside was when you told kids that you had a TV in your boombox, it was just as effective as telling them that your car talked to you like Knight Rider.

The first time I heard LL Cool J, Kool Moe D, and Alabama was on a box (weird mix I know). My Ice T experience was on a cassette tape that was so used the words of the song order were gone. Our high school weight room had a boombox that I knew so well I could hit the fast forward button just the right amount of time to skip over the songs we didn’t like.

I was forced to listen to all kinds of music because everyone had to share it. Heavy Metal, Rap, Country, even Blues and some Reggae – most everyone had at least one shot of playing what they could force upon the crew. If it made it through one playing…there was a chance you could get it in the rotation, or better yet on a mixtape!

And yes it’s true that I saw more than one fight regarding the music, had the boombox removed several times for misconduct, and was forced to learn to work with and through others to get played what I liked. iPod’s, as great as they are – don’t force us to interact…just the opposite. They teach us to be selfish…develop our own play-lists and listen to just what we want to listen to. I guess I’m saying I feel sorry for kids that don’t have the boombox experience, and sometimes I wish we still played music out loud in areas that forced you to listen to it…. it makes you stretch and grow.

Everything but Bluegrass…. Bluegrass just sucks.