I do most of my focused music listening in my car nowadays.
My latest thing is to create a playlist from iTunes after sorting my songs by time. I pick a specific time for a disc title, then fill it with all songs of that length. It is a pretty random dump of my catalog, but I then go in and remove the doubles by any artist and edit it down to no more than an hour and burn it to a disc… and enjoy.
That’s an interesting way to make a mix.
I also love having a cd player in my car and it’s where I get the most enjoyment out of listening to music…other than live at the show of course!
I have to try this method.
The last few weeks in the car I’ve played:
My two mixes of the best tracks from the GD Winterland 77 box set
Phosphorescent - C’est La Vie
A Bob Schneider mix for a few days.
My car is a 2006. I still love driving it and also plan to keep it as long as possible.
Are cassettes the new vinyl? We just hired a person who books musical acts and she claims cassettes are back…? I’m old
I collect cassettes. They are a common format for new music along with all the old offerings. They’re terrible though.
When I lived in NYC many of the bands would do cassette only releases of material. I don’t think the trend has the legs of vinyl because the players aren’t commonplace anymore and wear out more than LP players. You can buy a record player at Walmart.
I still have boxes of cassettes, however we’ve thrown away hundreds of tapes in the last few years.
Luckily, dinosaurs like us have one in the Crosley stereo I got from my mom and my wife’s 2005 Pilot is so old it still has a cassette deck built in.
You see, kids if you live long enough these formats all seem to roll back around… the sound still sucks though.
Lately, I have been forced to play Rebecka Black’s ‘Friday’ on repeat by my two girls. I am forced to keep both my hands firmly on the wheel, while they holler and dance like little gerbils on crack in the back seats. Guilty pleasure, indeed. Cannot thank you enough for that one, @inky
I can remember when my girls were young we had to listen to Hanson and the Spice Girls. Tough times to endure for sure.
Reading these entries about how you guys adjusted the music you play in the car to your kids’ tastes made me think forcing my god daughters to listen to grown up music instead of kids’ records was selfish on my part.
Then I remembered that when we took them to see Hadestown last weekend the 13 year old asked me to put on ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ and the 18 year old flipped when I played her Silver Jews.
There was a small amount of pushback when the oldest was about six. She said something about wanting me to put on a song about fruit salad and I told her that nonsense was for when she is in her parents’ car.
As I am writing this I am realizing it just makes me look worse and worse.
Well, the other side of the story is that my daughters incidentally picked up the “Friday” song from my current playlist.
This year my oldest daughter has kept asking me if we could listen to anything else than Ryan Adams (yes, I know, some debatable education right there) and “that boring old man” (aka Springsteen), when I drive them to school (she has actually started to warm up to Springsteen but her first nickname for him has stuck). She is, of course, very wrong there. We have also listened to Maria McKee a lot on our way to dance class and notably she has learned many important things about the Cardinals (“why was he so mean to them, dad”?).
By some strange coincidence, up until recently her favorite artists were Jenny Lewis (number one since about three years old), Lucinda Williams (when she had colic as a baby, she always stopped crying when we played the song “Protection”), Dinosaur Jr (“play J Mascis again, dad!”), Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (“I’ll Fly Away”, in particular) and Neil Young (her unlikely favorite is “Prisoners of Rock N’ Roll”).
Just your average kid’s preferences, if you ask me.
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