My music box

I often wonder what draws people to their listening preferences... their 'music box'. I hear various people say that their influences are this person or that person, this artist, this band, that sound. I admit I don't always hear whatever they are talking about. What I focus on instead is the feelings invoked for ME, thoughts, memories and yes... questions. I suppose I am a hard sell, most of my favorite songs have much more going on under the surface than meets the eye. I am not a mathmatician, I like words. Of course since I have a little girl this also equates to 'itsy bitsy spider' tossed in with a slice of 'So What'.

My playlist is eclectic, a combination of genres, decades. I have tried without success to create things such as 'driving audio' or something to play when doing distasteful tasks like cleaning my house. I have found lately that it's better just to turn on whatever sounds good to me at the time. I listen to a lot of different things, familiar as well as new just in case something jumps out at me. Is that what you do... or do you stick with tried and true? I do not love everything, I'm not even an artist addict, religiously following someone like Deadheads did or the merchandising nightmares that plague parents of most teenage girls....oh wait, YES I did belong to that group in the early 90s =P These days I guess I am more selective, what speaks to me might not mean anything to the majority of people I rub elbows with but that doesn't matter. I always believe in taking the good in something and leaving whatever doesn't apply - and this makes sense in music and most other parts of life itself. I do believe now more than ever that messages present in music connect people to each other, sometimes beyond this life. At the end of last year someone I hadn't known very long was suddenly gone.... but what he listened to made a difference for me.

As a recent avid watcher of youtube, I have been seeing a lot of user created videos and I'm fantasizing about making some of my own.... but how do you make a tribute of seemingly unrelated things? One of the coolest things I saw lately was a vid done for a contest (long over) combining Peter Petrelli (from Heroes) with 'Godspeed' (a song from my favorite band Anberlin) and I thought it was brilliant. Too bad I didn't think of it... but that's what I get for discovering the draw of youtube so late. Of course if you want to pick things apart even more, that's not the only thing I discovered late.... but that's for another episode.