Tag Archives: obsession

Totally fixated

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I get stuck on certain songs sometimes and I’m really stuck now. I stumbled on to an album called Folklore Riddim. I thought it was an album by an artist, but the first 3 songs had the exact same beat, and the 4th and final song was an instrumental with the same beat again.

Well, the joke was on me. It wasn’t an album by an artist. Folklore Riddim was the rhythm and the three songs were three different artists using that rhythm with their own lyrics. And now, about a month after finding this little album I’ve probably listened to the first song, Hello by KES about 250 times, Holing On by Turner 100 times, and Aye Yo by Sekon Sta 75 times. Yes, those totals are estimates, but no, they are not exaggerations.

Add one more listen to each of these as I’ve written this. The way I can get fixated on music is a bit obsessive. I know. I don’t care. These songs make me happy. I drive to them, play them on repeat in the gym, and find moments in the evening to just soak them in. In another month they will slip into my regular listens and I’ll find another obsession. But for now, thank you Kes for Hello, thanks to whomever wrote the original score, and thanks to whomever put this little album together… I love it!

On Repeat

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’.