I’m gonna steal a thought from John Cusack in High Fidelity concerning the mix tape. The Playlist, like the mix tape (and the away message), is an art form. I am not just talking about throwing all your mp3’s in a list and listening to them in winamp. I’m talking about making a playlist in terms of an mp3 player, or lists made for their specific purposes of mood listening. Now, I have a 128 mb mp3 player, and this amounts to somewhere in the range of 30-35 songs depending on the encoding quality and length of the songs. Now seeing as how the two major uses of my mp3 player are walking to class (where I use it the most) and studying, there is a certain balance that one must strike when making the list. One the one hand, you want up-beat, fun songs that you like to grove too for walking to class. Like Transformers the Movie Theme, or Eye of the tiger (those are particularly good for walking to tests) and Mr. Eels beautiful blues and Fatboy Slim’s Praise you or Right Here. These are excellent walking to class kind of songs. They are fun to sing, get your blood pumping and keep you moving. But the problem is, that these are not the best songs to listen to while studying. When studying you must keep it just upbeat enough to not fall asleep. The trick is to interweave slower songs and up-tempo songs. Particularly stay away from the songs that are long and have a great slow melody, Like the “Somewhere over the rainbow, What a wonderful world medley.” It is a great song, very relaxing, I love to try to sing with it, but it is long, and nice and slow, and most likely on the third round of your playlist during a day of studying, the next song can’t come fast enough to wake you up. That six minute monster will have you face down drooling on your books. So instead, I propose using something similarly relaxing, but significantly shorter….like Dido’s Thank you. Great song, very relaxing, but works well because it is shorter, and you can put a faster song before and after the slow song.
Generally I think you should start your playlist fast, right now I have a faster worship song at the beginning. That way I know it is quick, but not too fast, nice pace good for walking, but not to hard. Then I follow up with a little faster song….take it up a little…quicken the pace…have to make sure I’m not late for class. Then I put in “The Lord is Gracious and Compassionate” which is great cuz it slows things down, which means I can walk a little slower since I’m fat and out of shape, but late in the song it picks up tempo and finishes pretty hard with the solid heavy chords from the guitar and piano. Then I let in a lighter song….take the tempo up but keep it light.
This process keeps up until the playlist is complete. Except I throw in a funny song to make me laugh…that helps keep me awake during studying and is a change in pace while walking. So, this is what I did on Wednesday so I could go to class, but I missed class because it took to long make the list….my computer transfers songs far to slowly.
Anyway, there is my non-Bible post for now, I have other stuff to write about, but this seemed the most pressing on my mind…which is good, because a couple days ago the first thing on my mind was beating people down for no particular reason. I might write about that later.
Thank you, and goodmorning.