Music in My Ears: I write a lot about what I watch and read, but I rarely seem to write about what I listen to. My listening habits are somewhat diverse.
In the car I have Sirius, and I have rarely strayed from the channel 25, Little Steven's Underground Garage (Caution: Auto-playing sound! Turn your speakers down.) The best description I can think of for the music is that it is (generally) any rock and roll that is avid and enthusiastic while not being not affected or high-concept. You might hear an old Kinks song, then something from a Scandinavian garage band, then doo-wop, then an old Delta blues song, then the Clash, then a semi-kitsch Nancy Sinatra, then Otis Redding, then a Beatles outtake, then the Ramones, and so on. It has two great qualities that you can't usually get -- it isn't obsessed with commercial success, and you never know what to expect. Unique in radio, as far as I can tell.
When I'm working (meaning writing - not day job) at home or on the road with wi-fi, I find myself tuning into Pandora. A brilliant concept -- you enter the name of an artist or song you like and it searches through its database of music and starts playing similar songs or artists -- with dead simple execution: you simply go to the site, enter the artist/song and the music begins. It stores your selections as "radio stations," of which you may have up to one hundred. It's available to you anywhere there is an internet connection, including your iPhone (and presumably Android and Palm Pre, if not now, soon) which would be the only reason I'd have for a smartphone at the moment. Their own description of the service gives you an idea of what their target is. (They have an equally capable competitor called Last.fm, which has been snapped up by CBS, I think.)
At the gym, I listen to Trance. Trance is a sub-genre of electronica. It features very regular, driving beats and hypnotic melodic forms (I won't call them actual melodies because, in my aged mind, a melody is something you can hum), preferably without vocals. The point it is to sort of get lost in it, which makes me sound like some kind of hippie, but it's what I want at the gym -- to just get into an energetic rhythm and lose track of time as I work out. Yes, it's weird. Anyway, I really don't know the inside scoop on Trance other than a few big names -- Oakenfold, Digweed, Tiesto -- which probably mean nothing to you. They don't mean much to me either. The artists in Trance are DJs who remix the works of others into the Trance genre. The best thing about this type of music is that you can download extended mix sets, often up to two hours long, as single MP3s for free from any number of sites. New Mixes was one of them; although it appears to have died back in April, there are still downloads available. Other sites such as djmixes.net also provide links to free mixes although you have to jump through a few hoops, such as registration, and deal with slow download services. These sets are often only radio quality (because they often come from radio shows) but they are legal and free and good enough for the gym.
In any other circumstances -- such as flying or generally being out without my laptop or wi-fi -- I just listen to my Zune which contains, just about every sort of music you can imagine, from Bach to Sonny Rollins to Fountains of Wayne to Aaron Copeland to Louis Armstrong to Ursula 1000 to Steven Reich to Southern Culture on the Skids to Diana Krall, and a smattering of audiobooks to boot. Most of this has come from ripping used CDs and snagging el cheapo downloads from Amazon (they have a lot for free, and you can search within genre based on album price). I wish I could give some kind of rhyme or reason behind this mess but there is none, except perhaps ADD.
So there's some context for when I start doing music reviews.
