Random Twenty

My plan was to spend yesterday and this morning doing deep and substantive blogging while sidelined by a medical test. That sort of fell through, which means I get to spend an extra day in the lab, but also means you get lazy blogging. And what could be lazier than the classic “Random Tracks from iTunes”?

My recent listening has been dominated by live tracks from the KBCO discs posted at jefitoblog— there’s some great stuff there, check it out. For the sake of this, though, I’ll give you ten tracks from the four-and-five-star playlist, plus ten tracks from the entire music library, as a demonstration of why I usually use the four-and-five-star playlist for this…

Random music below the fold:

• “Singing In My Sleep,” Semisonic. A song that is linked in my mind with being in Japan.
• “Far Away Eyes,” The Rolling Stones. “I was so pleased to be informed of this, I ran twenty red lights in His honor.”
• “Find You At Last,” John Hiatt. Not my favorite Hiatt, but decent.
• “One More Song The Radio Won’t Like,” Kathleen Edwards. Country-ish singer-songwriter stuff. The radio didn’t like it, but I do.
• “Idiot’s Revenge,” The Bottle Rockets. “She’s so political, so sophisticated,/ She would swear in court that everything’s just overrated.”
• “1979,” Smashing Pumpkins. The album is a self-indulgent mess, but it has its moments.
• “I’ll Come Running Back To You,” Sam Cooke. Classic, pioneering soul.
• “Starting To Hurt,” Ryan Adams. Off Demolition, somewhere between Gold and Rock and Roll.
• “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?” Frank Zappa. Tasteful, as always.
• “Rip This Joint,” The Rolling Stones. Off Exile on Main Street an album with almost no bad tracks.

Switching the source to the entire library, we get:

• “All the Love That’s Wasted,” World Party
• “Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness,” Alabama 3
• “Days Like This Keep Me Warm,” The Polyphonic Spree
• “Story Of My Life,” Loretta Lynn
• “She Hates Me,” Puddle of Mudd
• “What Would You Say,” Dave Matthews Band
• “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Benny Goodman & His Orchestra
• “Starry Configurations,” Jets To Brazil
• “Gates Of Eden,” Bob Dylan
• “Pencil Thin Mustache,” Jimmy Buffett

You get no commentary with these, because I don’t even know some of these songs. One of these ten wasn’t even my purchase– Kate got it off iTunes (bonus points if you guess which one). And I cheated a bit– I hit “refresh” a few times before I came up with this list.

Which is why the random track lists I do are rarely truly random– I’m not that familiar with my own music collection.