Yesterday, I was reminded of just how odd a music selection I choose to listen to at times. I listen to my personal collection of tunes daily but I guess I associate a lot of it with specific experiences rather than genre, specifically. For example, right this moment, I'm listening to Aerosmith and remembering my youth and just how much I enjoyed Aerosmith at that age.
But yesterday I was at the Buy Nothing Day Free Market and at first we were listening to reasonably popular tunes on a laptop (I recognized them as current hits but not the oens that I don't already know) for a bit and felt relaxed to be hearing those catchy tunes. I know them to be recent hits from the last year or two. Which was followed by some Christmas music that, I think wasn't very good at all. I mean, sure I love Christmas music (and will probably start listening to Christmas music myself soon as I'll start writing Christmas cards in the next week or so, in all likelihood), but this was incredibly unfamiliar Christmas music seeing as the radio station we got the best reception on in the room were we were located was an incredibly Christian one and well… a lot of these songs were just unfamiliar/not my cup o' tea.
And I started thinking about what I actually do choose to listen to on a regular basis. And it's a grand swath of both what is popular (over time, of course) and what provides a certain type of enjoyment whether comedic, whether it fits with my personal value system, whether it suits my nerdy/geeky interests, or whether it just has an interesting tune. I associate certain types of music with certain things, of course: Electronica with a certain time in my life, Chiptunes with certain video games, musical soundtracks with the motifs from their storylines, etc.
And you know what? I can't say I have a personal favourite genre of music to listen to: I like oldies, new music, country, classical, soundtrack, world, indie etc. But when folks ask, I probably can say I listen to nerdy/geeky/folk/humorous etc. music the most often because that's what takes up the majority of my music library. I really like Jonathan Coulton's music and for darn good reasons, really. The same goes for Weird Al Yankovic, The Doubleclicks, Molly Lewis, and oh so many other musical artists in my personal music library. But that doesn't always match with what concerts I go to or what music I buy most frequently on physical or digital media.
Thanks to Kickstarter I own the entire back catalogue for a number of musical artists I really love. Thanks to serendipity I've seen great live music concerts from bands such as The Presidents of the United States of America, Twisted Sister, The Village People, or Barrage. I really enjoy the small shows I've seen like from The Fugitives, and the large shows I've seen like Savage Garden or Simple Plan. And I probably own more Cirque CDs than I do most other music artists. Just as I adore soundtracks to musicals I've actually seen. I don't know if this all makes much sense really.
Because for me music has a lot to do with my mood, with the lyrics, with my memories associated and much much more. Music is so multi-faceted.