One of the reasons (among many) that I despair of ever pulling together mix CDs for my cousins, is the occasionally wondrous serendipity of random play choices by iTunes on my phone whilst driving to and fro. Recently the last two days of July saw just such fortuitous track listings pulled out of the algorithmic æther as I went to and from work. The song choices are not perfect (the Latin selections, in particular, could have been better, but the fault is more likely with the paucity of my collection than the Brownian Motion behind my phone’s choices), but I have to ask myself if I could have sequenced better even given weeks of planning.
Here is the listing for the songs heard going and coming, on July 30 2020:
July 30, 2020
Going (side A)
time: 28:35
- “Leben heisst Leben” – Laibach
- “Brothers In Arms” – Dire Straits
- “Here You Come Again” – Dolly Parton
- “Come Rain Or Come Shine” – Billie Holiday
- “In The Light” – Led Zeppelin
Coming home (side B)
time: 29:53
- “I Am A Rock” – Simon & Garfunkel
- “Man Or Animal” – Audioslave
- “Dónde Están” – Siempre Así
- “Driving Your Girlfriend Home” – Morrisey
- “Bongo Festeris” – Jack Costanzo
- “World On A String” – Neil Young
- [live version from Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live]
- “Beth Sy’n Digwydd l’r Fuwch” – Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
- “Big Black Smoke” – The Kinks
- “Pifa” (pastoral symphony) – from Handel’s Messiah
- Karl Richter w/ The London Philharmonic Choir
Perhaps even better than the day before, the next set of music made me doubt my ability to curate a mix CD for friends and family; it also made my commute much more enjoyable that it would have been otherwise. Not all random mixes from iTunes are this good—I’ve been told that my car music is mostly unlistenable—but I like it. I do not stream, and see no reason to do so as long as I get music like this.
That said, here is the listing for the following day, July 31, 2020:
July 31, 2020
Going (side C)
time: 25:50
- “Haitian Divorce” – Steely Dan
- “I’m Bound For That Promised Land” – Hank Williams
- “Prelude” – Joe Gallant & Illuminati
- “Your Latest Trick” – Dire Straits
- “Close The Door Richard” – Burl Ives
- “Let The Bass Go” – The D.O.C.
- “Suite In A: Allemande” – from Book II of Marin Marais’s Pièces de Viole
- performed by Jérôme Hantaï & Alix Verzier on bass viols and Pierre Hantaï on harpsichord
Coming home (side D)
time: 28:11 (not including bonus track)
- “Think It Over” – B. B. King
- “Bees” – Laura Cantrell
- “Der Letzte Countdown” – The Heimatdamisch
- “Talisman” – Air
- “Sunshine And Clouds And Everything” – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
- “Mockingbird” – Eminem
- “Du-Tam” – [Serbian folk song from old 78 collection (not mine)]
- “Hip Length” – Ursula 1000
Bonus Track: Lowell Thomas 6:30 PM [Eastern War Time] broadcast for NBC News on D-Day
The songs offered by my phone come from a panoply of playlists both smart and otherwise which I maintain in iTunes (and which I fear may leave me—as massive amounts of hand-picked album art left some early adopters—if I ever “up”grade to the latest MacOS*) and have crafted with both attentiveness and negligence over the past decade or so. Thus, for example, track numbers A2, A5, B6, B11, C1, C4, C6, and D13 come from heavy rotation playlists, while numbers A3, B14, D7, D10, and D15 derive from lists of most recently added tracks. The remainder bubbled up from semi-random rules meant to capture stuff I haven’t heard in a long while, stuff I liked a while back, and stuff I’ve never heard. I should also point out—as if it were not painfully obvious to most of y’all who perused the tracks listed above—that I am hopelessly stale bourgeois boring person who has ‘taste’ only in the same way that a person who eats nothing but donuts can be said to have a ‘diet’.
* I plan to write in more detail about my woes with the Apple ecosystem later, so please strive to hold back your knee-jerk responses of “You should use Linux!” or “Serves you write for not just buying a PC!” until then, if ever.