Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Great Big L


Many of you know that a couple of summers ago I decided to listen to every song on my ipod in alphabetical order. Why I attempted this I don't know, though some of the advantages of listening to music that way are discussed below. Anyway, I didn't make it all the way through...I think I got bored sometime in the Ks. So when we got to Hawaii, I decided to start back up again with L. So for our whole trip and about a week after, all I listened to were songs that start with the letter L.

One of the nice things about this is that you get to try to guess what song is going to be next. This almost never happens successfully, but it is surprisingly entertaining. For example, when "Long-Forgotten Fairy Tale" by the Magnetic Fields came up, I predicted the next song would be "Long, Long, Long" by the Beatles. However, Long with a hyphen comes before long with no hyphen, so next was "Long Black Veil" by Johnny Cash. Then came "Long Hot Summer" (Hendrix) and "Long Live the Dead Guy" (Johnny Socko). And next was..."Long Long Time" by Schooner?? The Beatles song is long with a comma at th end, so it didn't come for another 11 songs, and that's not exactly the best song to be waiting around to hear.

This method also exposes some weaknesses of the music collection. Sometimes songs are on there more than once for various reasons. More importantly, a good song that you think of that could be coming up ends up not being on the ipod. The most glaring examples of this were "Liar" by Rollins Band and "Little Red Corvette" by Prince. I've since corrected the Rollins problem, and I may be able to get some Prince from my sister at when I'm home for Christmas. Now here are some stats from the L section of my ipod.

A total of 463 songs, just over 25 hours worth of music.
First song: "L.A." by Eliot Smith. Last song: "Lyric" by Zwan.

Top 3 Words starting with L that start song titles:
1. Love (or some form of the word) -- 59 songs.
2. Let (or Let's) --34 songs.
3. Little -- 32 songs.

Top 5 most played songs starting with L:
1. "Losing My Hair" by Crimea
2. "Little Fern" by Portistatic
3. "Little House of Savages" by The Walkmen
4. "Letter From an Occupant" by The New Pornographers
5. "Let's Get Out of This Country" by Camera Obscura

1 comment:

h.Lo said...

That's random and hilarious. One particular birthday, I listened to every Red House Painters album in chronological order. That was a depressing task.

You should definitely be pulling together some sort of alphabetical playlist with these top 5's. =)