Dragons Roamed Here

Deferred maintenance
Weeds grown over rails
Abandon metal

Dragons roamed here
Wise and old recall
Steam, horns, fire and flight

No more

Natures hand reclaims
Tall weeds
Bursting trees
A dragons path reclaimed

Chilled windy silence now

Especially for those that remember

Favorite Song

Kids ask lots of questions.  My 8-year-old step-daughter is no exception.  When she queried what my favorite song was, I was a bit taken off guard.  The question is simple, for me, the answer is not. To her this is just one in a long line of questions you ask anyone you are getting to know, like a child version of a job interview.  What is your favorite color?  Animal?  Food? etc.  To me, the question of favorite song sends my brain, both left and right halves, into a spiral of variables, weights, and measures, which, actually can’t be measured or stood up against each other in any way.

I live, love, and breathe music. Some days I listen to music upwards of ten plus hours in one day.  I’m sure I’ve topped more than that, but I tend not to keep track.  Perhaps it would be a good idea to do so, just to see what my record might be or could possibly be.

So for all of that listening, what IS my favorite song?  Thanks to an accidental discovery several years ago, this is more measurable.  Like I said in the first paragraph, this isn’t THE sole measure but it’s as good as any.

This discovery was essentially a song count column letting you know how many times you’ve listened to a given song in your Google Play library.  This count doesn’t seem to propagate across devices; for example, the count doesn’t seem to be the same on my various tablets and phones, or perhaps it does… I know playlists won't sync.  I’ll have to investigate further.

So…………….

……...going solely by this metric, my favorite song is…….

“Bus Stop Boxer” by Eels for their album “Souljacker” played 374 times on my PC. Almost 220 more times than the second place song.  Surely this huge margin unequivocally crowns “Bus Stop Boxer” the winner.  Sure not all my listens are included such as in the car on CD, other devices, etc,.... but it’s like a survey vs a census. A survey is often more accurate anyway, right?  

“Bus Stop Boxer,” however, is NOT my favorite song.  I happen to know I got pulled away from my desk, at some point, with the song on repeat, and came back hours (or was it even days?) later to this huge song count.

“Boxer” is a cool song, but the only song I have by the Eels.  I wasn’t that interested, after the inevitable window shopping, in any of the rest of “Souljacker” and I don’t make a habit of listening to “Boxer” all that often.  If it comes up in shuffle mode I won’t hit skip, but I won’t jam out to it in my seat either.

The song on repeat behavior used to be a no-no. A self imposed sanction I placed upon myself preventing me from listening to the same album or song more than once on a given day.  As time went on, this loosened and eventually shattered.  In retrospect, I regret it now.

I felt, at the time, narrowing my enjoyment of music to one song and playing the be-jesus out if it was bad for my enjoyment of the art.  I didn’t want to burn out on a song only to replace it with the next disposable piece of music.  In other words, I didn’t want to consume music the way I felt everyone else did.

To a certain extent this is true, but I think good music, like any art should be enjoyed too, not just put on a pedestal.  Not to be rationed like M.R.E’s in a fallout shelter. Humorously enough technology at the time only encouraged this behavior.  Repeating a single song wasn’t easy on a cassette and you would involuntarily become very familiar with both the end of the previous song and the beginning of the next; not to mention, you had to stay within arms length of the stereo’s fast forward and rewind buttons.

I remember being horrified to learn, in the year prior to my arrival on campus, a future best friend of mine held himself up in his dorm like some sort of stand off with the A.T.F. and blasted a Shania Twain song at high volume for days on end.  Only to emerge, after much worry by my other college buddies, like nothing had happened. Therapy; whatever works for him. To me, it would have been more like torture and I would have grown to hate the song no matter how much I liked it beforehand. Perhaps this was what I was most afraid of with my “One listen per day” policy. Violation could result in over familiarity leading to distaste of a perfectly beautiful song.

Earlier in life I had a similar system, not automated like Google Play, but functioning in the same manner.

I had a CD tower with room for about 50 cds, if I recall correctly, and I believe they were organized by artist.  Next to my CD player (when I could finally afford one and after getting thrown out of BestBuy (a blog for another day)), was a stack of between five and ten CDs.

These were the heavy rotation CDs, a measure of who was on top. Every day, while doing homework or hanging out, I would remove the CD in the player, put it in it’s case, and place in on top of the pile; the next CD would be pulled from that “top five or ten” pile, placed in the player, and its case placed on top.

Every day I would order my music play in a manner where I would save the best for last, so my favorite album at the time would end up on top.

As time would go on, if something would get pulled from the tower it would last for a while before being subjugated back to the tower.  As new music was purchased or gifted, albums would get pushed back to the tower.  I didn’t stop liking those albums, they just weren’t what was hot anymore.

The trouble with this was it was “of the moment, or of the day.”  I kept no record, and I’m glad I didn’t.

Flash to today.  I still have CDs…. somewhere, but the vast majority of music consumption is done digitally with no stacks and stacks of CDs in towers on the verge of being knocked over.

This brings us back to Google’s song count. What then, is number two?  Sadly enough it’s “Reptile’s Theme” by Skrillex for some sort of Mortal Kombat tribute album.  Sure it’s a great song to butt dance to in your chair, but is more of a guilty pleasure than a work of great artistry.  Sure reggae style rap to dubstep is shamefully a soft spot of mine, but I don’t think I would hold “Reptile’s Theme” aloft proudly as my favorite song.  I suspect a similar circumstance as “Bus Stop Boxer” led to some inflated numbers, but I can’t recall a specific incident.  As I write this, it is only one play ahead of where things get interesting. At 153, 142, 136 and 134 come the real contenders.

In order they are:

1. “Electric Heart” by Sia from “1000 Forms Of Fear”
2. “Slim Pickens Does The Right Thing…..” by The Offspring from “Days Go By”
3. “Heart Is A Drum” by Beck from “Morning Phase”
4. “Wood Chipper” by John Hiatt from “Mystic Pinball”

Hide your kids, the faint of heart should look away, old anecdotes are over, old explanations of album tracking systems put aside, these are the true contenders.

In part two I will break down the contenders in detail and discuss some curious omissions and other odd findings. Stay tuned.