I have an eclectic taste in music. From Zeppelin to Taylor Swift, Black Eyed Peas to AC/DC, Eminem to Vivaldi, Kitaro to the Violent Femmes… I don’t care who the artist is. I hear a song that hits me the right way and I’m hooked. When a song strikes a chord with me (literally and figuratively) I get a bit obsessed.
Right now that song is Last Man Standing by Livingston.
I’m listening to it now… on repeat while I write this.
‘On repeat’ used to be so much harder. Now I just click the repeat icon twice on my iPhone and the song plays until I change the setting.
I can remember lying down on the floor in the living room next to my parent’s record player and getting up after the song played so that I could lift the record player arm and gently put it back to the start of the song again, and again, and again. And when I say I remember doing this, I’m not exaggerating. Despite the memories going back 40-45 years I can still remember the songs I did this with: Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, The Carpenters ‘Top of the World’, Lipps ‘Funkytown’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘All of My Love’, and Pink Floyd’s ’Mother’… I wasn’t joking when I said my tastes were eclectic.
Later I improved my ‘on repeat’ skills with a Radio Shack tape recorder.
I can remember having an entire 45 minute tape side with nothing except Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ and The J. Geils Band’s ‘Freeze Frame’. The songs don’t just alternate, they were in the order that I was able to record them from a pop rock am radio station. It was an art form simultaneously hitting the play and record button on the tape machine just when the DJ stopped talking, and still maximizing the song’s intro that he was talking over.
My recent obsessions before my current one were Taylor Swift’s ‘Maroon’, Colin Hay from Men at Work singing an acoustic version of ‘Overkill’, Sean Brown’s ‘Higher Baby’, David Wilcox’s ‘Breakfast at the Circus’, Mia Morris’ ‘Gone My Way’, and Michaela Slinger’s ‘Petty Things’.
I have no idea what song or even what genre will tickle my musical fancy next, but until then, I’ll be choosing between these most recent choices ‘on repeat’.
Pingback: 💬 On Repeat | Read Write Collect
David, I am wondering how these songs end up ‘on repeat’? Clearly, some tracks click, but for that to happen, we need to listen to a wide range of music? Are there times you listen to the radio? Or is there times when your children or wife are playing music that you pick up new tracks from? This is one of those things that intrigues me, especially in the age of algorithms?
Greetings Aaron,
They mostly come from two different places:
1. My meanderings online.
2. Playlists created for me by my oldest daughter. She knows my taste in music and adds songs for me regularly. I would never have heard of bands like Milky Chance had it not been for her, and their songs ‘Stolen Dance’ and ‘Down by the River’ have both ended up ‘on repeat’ for me.
Beyond that I get almost no exposure. Alone in the car I listen to ebooks and podcasts, and with family we listen to playlists.
That said, I also get a bit of exposure to musical theatre songs because my youngest is a theatre actress and my wife and I go to shows all the time. But while I listen all the time to these songs and it widens my exposure, these songs are seldom ones I get stuck on.
My oldest knows my taste so well she’ll often find classic oldies I haven’t heard in a while and so a number of retro songs end up getting a lot of play too. For example she helped me rediscover The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’ which I can get stuck on.
Right now my TikTok algorithm has me listening to Eminem, and the other socials are not feeding me any new music so I might be stuck with my current list unless my daughter pushes something new my way.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense. My daughters are not yet at the stage of giving me suggestions, but they definitely know my tastes, probably even more so than say Spotify. Something about a human algorithm sometimes. For example, I have a massive playlist of songs I like for a range of reasons and they can often tell me why I added the song. My eldest can also name many of the artists I listen to via vinyl, however the only artist that has actually cross-pollinated has been Kate Miller-Heidke.