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You know, I always put my iPod on “Shuffle.” I have around 1700 songs on there and I just like the sense of being surprised by what is coming next. Also it keeps things from being forgotten and somehow the juxtaposition of completely different styles of music creates some kind of spark in me, turns me on more. I look back on the days of listening to the same album over and over again as sort of a rusted, dated, “Provincial” type attitude, as it were.
There’s also another benefit for me. Since my own songs are on there, every once in a while, I get to unexpectedly see how my songs and music, fit in or “hold their own” against the “legitimized” tracks in my library. And to my surprise, and usually when I’m at a point where I am sort of “down” on the quality of my own work, I get this strange sense of feeling my own work objectively, as if it were someone else’s. It seems a trick the brain plays when the setting is on shuffle. And its a pleasant one. And more often than not I end up actually enjoying my own work as much as the preceding and ante-ceding tracks that have qued up. It’s a weird sort of exhilarating feeling of seeing myself as someone else, and liking that someone.
I was playing golf the yesterday evening. And in the middle of the shuffle play list one of my songs came up, “The Darkest Hour Comes.” It’s a song I did a year or so ago. I’ve posted it on this blog before. I can’t remember which songs it came in the context of, but I remember I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it and the quality of the recording within the context of the “professional” cuts that surrounded it.
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