Cold-Reading The Lyrics

I’ve got into this funny habit, over the years, of making playlists containing all the music that such and such a friend of mine has given me or recommended to me. Some of them aren’t entirely accurate – I’m lazy about making them, so sometimes everything I have by a particular artist will end up in a playlist when the person who puts their name to that particular playlist only actually gave me one song by that person, or whatever. Which is a bit of problem because a lot of people seem to have given me Pink Floyd at some point, so not only does their entire oeuvre appear multiple times in my library, the whole lot has made it into a number of playlists, and they’re a good band, I see why they’re so famous, I’m just not a massive fan. They’re growing on me, still. Anyway, that’s a tangent, back to my point… *drifts*….

Oh, yes. The reason why I still do this so obsessively (when the original intent was to have all of one person’s music in one place so that I could make the effort to listen to it all pretty soon after recieving it, so I could report back and enthuse about this or that artist with them) is because  I find it fascinating how you can tell apart peoples’ tastes – some peoples bequests to me all fall under one genre – commercial hiphop, say, or indie, indie, and more indie. That’s easy enough. And then other people have tastes ranging across a whole host of genres, from classical and jazz to metal and rock, to eighties pop, nineties ballads, dance, trance, you name it, but quite often you realise that all the songs they like have some kind of a feeling, a mood, in common, which I can’t put my finger on it. K’s tastes are by and large for happy, comfort-listening songs. C’s are, well, there isn’t a word for it, but I’d go with songs which feel somehow grey. A misty kind of a grey. Which is roughly the mood I’m in now, so guess whose playlist I’m playing? A goes for manically upbeat, B’s songs all sound a bit stoned, D just listens to indie, V is an unusual mixture of very, very happy songs, and very very sad songs. And so on.

This is not to say I am some kind of friend’s-music-leeching pirate. I am trying, slowly, to buy all the music I listen to, unless it genuinely was a gift to me, and get rid of the rest. With a library like mine it’s rather difficult. But I’ll get there. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting. I wonder if I was given a blind listening-test of some stuff these people listen to that I don’t have, whether I would be able to guess who owns what… . Oddly enough I think I might. Do I win the music if I guess right? Pretty please?