Typically, I listen to music from my iTunes library on “shuffle” mode. That’s my default, which varies depending on the goal at hand (not that listening to music is always attached to a goal).
The songs, however, also can be lined up according their timed lengths, which can alter the way one passes time. “OK, I’ll go down to the pool and listen to 15, four-minute songs to get in an hour of sun.”
When recording the songs for “So Far So Good,” Ronnie Nice and I became conscious of a particular song’s length only if it seemed too short or too long in the demo versions. But for the most part, thanks to the fine example of “lean and mean” set over decades by the Ramones, to name just one of a million bands, we didn’t stress lengthening the songs that happened to clock in at under 3:00.
(And I do single out the Ramones if only to tell the story of how one time I stepped off a bus in some small town on the Argentine and Paraguayan borders – chaperone to a dozen teenagers on a church-sponsored “mission trip” – to encounter a street vendor whose cardboard boxes were full of CDs. Yes, 20 years ago, I still collected CDs.
The arpa (a type of South American guitar) music discs I picked up that day remain among my favorites.
But I also spied a bootlegged Ramones CD. A double-disc, “greatest hits” set, well worth whatever I paid, despite the cheap copy machine artwork and sleeve. Good memory.)
So today I noticed that the first two songs on “So Far So Good” are 3:07 in length. Which made me wonder how many other 3:07 songs I might find in my personal library.
The answer blew me away.
There are 90 songs in my digital music collection that time out at 3:07.
So, the Josephmooon songs, “Floats Boat” and “One Word,” are in good company, along with appropriately great tracks like “Brain Salad Surgery,” by Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Ava Max’s “Sweet But Psycho,” “The Kids Are Alright,” by The Who, “Go With The Flow,” by Queens of the Stone Age, and Nadine Shah’s “Washed Up.”
It’s a four-and-a-half-hour plus playlist.
So, the moral of this story is, don’t worry about listening to a song you might not like very much. It’ll be over in a few minutes. And try to not complain about it, because maybe it’s a song that someone else really enjoys.
Don’t be a bummer.
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