Musical Baton

I was passed a musical baton by Nick Finck, while everyone else getting the same baton ignored me.  Losers.  (With the last-minute exception of Meryl, who passed one to me just as I was preparing to post.)

Total volume of music files on my computer

8.74 gigabytes, comprised of 1,885 songs that would take 5 days, 16 hours, 8 minutes and 22 seconds to play through.

The last CD I bought was

“Decksanddrumsandrockandroll” by The Propellerheads.  The last CD bought on my behalf, as a birthday gift, was a set of the 1963 von Karajan / Berlin Philharmonic recordings of Beethoven’s Symphonies.

Song playing right now

As I post this message, it’s “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin from “Led Zeppelin IV”.  This might be interpreted as support for Mike Davidson‘s opinion of the Zep, except that I don’t agree with it.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

I’ll take the latter.

• “O Come, O Come, Emannuel” (traditional hymn)
• “Road” by Nick Drake from “Pink Moon”
• “Driven” by Rush from “Test For Echo”
• “4th of July” by Soundgarden from “Superunknown”
• “Life During Wartime (Live)” by The Talking Heads from “Sand In The Vaseline: Popular Favorites 1976-1992”

Bonus addendum piece: the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, “Allegretto”.  It’s haunting, moving, inexpressably sad and triumphant.  It doesn’t hold emotional meaning for me the way the other songs I listed do, but it has emotional effects that are unlike almost any other piece of music I know.

Five six people to whom I’m passing the baton

• Tantek Çelik, just to see how many times he can work in references to his girlfriend
• Simon Willison, dashing Brit-about-town
• Scott Andrew, ex-Clevelander and lo-fi acoustic pop superhero
• Mark Bradbourne, new daddy and drummer
• Gini, because she’s always meme-ing, and besides, it’s the musical equivalent of the book meme she propogated a week or two back
• Will Kessel, because I’m curious

I’d have pointed to more web designer types, but they’d pretty much all been batoned already.

So there you have it: a little break from semanticity.  Now all we need is a music-categorization microformat, and I could merge the two.

• Musical Baton was published on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been six replies.