I was looking at a clip on youtube earlier about a german guy called The Trainrider who spent the last year of his young life trainsurfing around europe before dying of leukemia. The intro music to the clip is a piece by Enya called Caribbean Blue and it's a fairly recognisable tune. The celtic calmness got my juices going so being of focused mind immediately downloaded the whole track from alltunes.com. I love pieces of music that get you thinking, sometimes the words or the feeling they give you, but ultimately it's the mood they put you in. Spark yourself up in the morning listening to the Grease soundtrack, chill out later listening to Massive Attack, free your mind with Led Zeppelin. It's like a personal psychology experiment.
I like to think that this song by Enya is fairly sad, soulful and relaxing. In fact it almost brings a tear to my eye when I listen to it, but there's an overall sense of contemplative happiness that I get which is an interesting contrast. Everyone has a song like this they know, one that makes you sad but you don't know why - or maybe you know why it makes you sad but can't let it go.
Working the way techies do means you're surrounded by music in various formats, and there's such a range of music to listen to that you rarely just stick your entire collection on random and hit play. You pretty much stick to choosing album/artist/playlist according to your current mood. I'd love to write a program that stores the music I listen to during the day so at 6pm I can look back and see if the music I listened to affected my day greatly in any way. Or even over the week - see which days were good, which were bad and what music you listened to. I reckon there would be some interesting results.
