This is the first ten off the random list, with some comments:
- Bert Jansch, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, this comes from a Best-Of that I downloaded from eMusic during the last heady days of the unlimited downloads.
- Massive Attack vs. Mad Professor, Eternal Feedback. Who knows how this turned up in the pile? It sounds like it's got a wobble board on it, but I guess it's probably an entirely computerised wobble board. I bet this came from
dmw. - The Chieftans, Morgan Magan. The sort of tinkle tinkle plonky thing that gives instrumental folk music a bad name, really. It's like concentrated essence of bad 70s folk TV shows. Actually, the vast majority of the music we have in iTunes has words. Really. I know this is three in a row instrumentals, but it's an aberration.
- The Oyster Band, Lost and Found. This was the first Oysterband song I ever heard. I liked it a lot, but they sing it way better now. Actually less than 1% of the songs we have on iTunes are by the Oysterband, so it wasn't even odds on they'd turn up in this list. (That's only because there was quite a lot of Oyster stuff in the last pile we ripped, which wasn't backed up to DVD -- so we have to go get again from the CDs. At present there are 98 Oysterband songs out of a total of 10556).
- The Magnetic Fields, I Think I Need a New Heart. One of the 69 love songs, of course. It's just one of the great albums of our time.
- Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick, Our Captain Cried All Hands. Off a compilation. Very ballad.
- The Cars, Drive. I liked the Cars before Live Aid, ok? I have their first two albums on vinyl somewhere.
- Midnight Oil, Best of Both Worlds. Midnight Oil are just a little bit outside my tastes. I adored their huge hit Beds are Burning, but this one feels like journeyman album-fodder to me.
- Ian McCulloch, I Know You Well. Candleland is a jolly good album but I don't think this is one of the better tracks.
- Steeleye Span, Gone to America. I've liked this song for a long time; I don't suppose Maddy Prior can sing it these days.
Gosh, what an interesting exercise. I feel like doing it again now. I mostly listen to my iPod on Randomly Shuffle Everything mode, I find it a very agreeable way to listen to music.
