25 songs

A friend of mine on Facebook posted this idea and it was the first useful thing I have seen on Facebook in ages. For the last time: I don’t care about your Mafia Wars game! No one cares about your Mafia Wars game! Nor do I care about what fictional character you most resemble. But this one was a bit more interesting.

Simple idea. Put your iPod on shuffle and write down the first twenty five songs that come out. No cheating and not listing a song that you are embarrassed that you have. Just a list of the first 25 songs you hear. Now admittedly I do not have an iPod but I do have a Zune, which is the size of a small tackle box but does have a shuffle feature. It is twelve menus down but you can do it. So here is my 25.

1: Veruca Salt “Number One Blind” from “American Thighs”
2: Kasey Chambers “Hollywood” from “Wayward Angel”
3: Carbon Leaf “Mary Mac” from “5 Alive”
4: Lucinda Williams “Get Right with God” from “Essence”
5: Waco Brothers “Lake of the Vinegar” from “To the Last Dead Cowboy”
6: Scott Miller and the Commonwealth “Loving that Girl” from “Thus Always to Tyrants”
7: Mary Lou Lord “The Lucky One” from “Got No Shadow”
8: The Frames “God Bless Mom” from “Set List”
9: Emmylou Harris “Little Bird” from “Stumble Into Grace”
10: Iris Dement “Near the Cross” from “Lifeline”
11: U2 “Can’t Help Fallin’ in Love with You” from “The Eye of the Fly” (1992 concert bootleg)
12: Anders Osborne “Don’t Pray for Me” from “Live at Tipitinas”
13: Ryan Adams “Two” from “Easy Tiger”
14: The Sundays “Blood on my Hands” from “Blind”
15: Old 97s “Making Love with You” from “Down to the Promised Land”
16: U2 “I Fall Down” from “October”
17: The Sundays “Cry” from “Static and Silence”
18: Freakwater “Flat Hand” from “Springtime”
19: Black 47 “Walk All the Days” from “Live in New York City”
20: Richard Buckner “Stutterstep” from “Impasse”
21: Kelly Willis “Get Real” from “Kelly Willis”
22: Iris Dement “Calling for You” from “My Life”
23: Lucinda Williams “Steal Your Love” from “Essence”
24: Cowboy Junkies “Escape is so Simple” from “Open Road”
25: Arcade Fire “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” from “Funeral”

So what does this tell us? First off, it shows that the shuffle feature on my Zune is rather crappy as I got two songs from the same album and repeats of four different artists (I’m not going to sit around and calculate the odds of that happening but it was more than it should.) Pretty even mix of male versus female vocalists (12 male versus 13 female.) I have seen fourteen of the acts in concert and that is not including Scott Miller (who I saw when he headed up the V-Roys) and Iris Dement (who I drank with before her daughter in law (Pieta Brown)’s concert but never actually got to see her perform.)

Other than U2 you are really stretching in terms of popular acts. Arcade Fire definitely is known and Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris are common names to music fans. Veruca Salt, Black 47 and Cowboy Junkies all had a hit or two in their day and Glen from The Frames has an Oscar but I figure that most people would look at this list and not have any of the discs. It also shows my usual songs from collections that no one has ever heard of (I have more U2 bootlegs lying around than I would like to admit.) That is what most people will point to when they talk about my music snobbery. Even my U2 songs are relatively unknown.

Anyone else have some thoughts here? Am I a music snob who will never admit to liking anyone popular? What does it say that when I choose 25 songs at random from my Zune that I have had a beer with several of the acts? Is there any reasoning behind the surprising number of religious songs that appeared? Help me out.