Mi iPod

(ThyPod... anyone?)

It's very interesting how I have put use to my iPod on this trip. I will tend to listen to my iPod while walking anywhere, or travelling by bus or train, or reading something or when I can't hook up to a computer's output with my headphones - and I will watch vidoes whenever stationary and bored or trying to sleep. The basic list of what I listen to is as follows:

PODCASTS
(right now) NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me - 25 episodes (I love to listen to this early in the mornings to help me wake up and put me in a good mood
KCRW's Good Food - 16 episodes (I listen to this at all times and again and again, it's a really great podcast that really is all about food and how to make incredible things, interviews with people that have great ideas on food and about restaurants and everything)
NPR Food - 18 episodes (significantly more journalistic and boring than KCRW's Good Food... but still interesting since I love food)
Wine Library TV - 4 episodes (with Garry Vaynerchuk - if you took a rowdy guy from a bar, put him in front of a camera and injected lots of wine knowledge into him, this is what you'd get - very entertaining if not necessarily productively didactic)

and a variety of one-episode downloads that aren’t that great, except I wish I had more than one Prairie Home Companion episode

PLAYLISTS
*Broadway-type songs (Spring Awakening, Into the Woods, Avenue Q, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Spamalot, Footloose, Phantom of the Opera, How to Succeed, Wicked, and random other songs from Rent or Little Shop of Horrors or whatever I've sung with the VC) Celtic Rock (Enter the Haggis, Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphies)
*Celtic Traditional (The Chieftans, Dick Lee/Hamish Moore, Gráda)
*Chronicles of Narnia
*Frank Zappa (Apostrophe)
*Iona (albums Beyond these Shores, Book of Kells, The Circling Hour, Open Sky)
*Lord of the Rings
*Maria Schneider (albums Allégresse, Concert in the Garden, Sky Blue)
*Metal (Epica - The Divine Conspiracy album and most of Consign to Oblivion and as many others as I managed to download last semester, and several works by Kamelot)
*Nightwish (albums Oceanborn, Century Child, Once, Dark Passion Play)
*Once Upon a Mattress PDQ Bach (album The Dreaded PDQ Bach Collection Volume 1 - 4 discs)
*Quiet As the Moon (a Peanuts themed album by Dave Brubeck)
*Relaxing Mix (Iona, Lament by Rhythm and Brass, Venus by Holst, Sleeper Car by Wynton Marsalis, some Charlotte Church, Hush Hush Hush by Herbie Hancock and Annie Lennox, Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson, Some Devil by Dave Matthews, Moved Through the Fair by Enter the Haggis, Mockingbird and Numbers On Paper by Mose Allison, Round Midnight as done by Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea, Monk's Mood by Danilo Perez, Princess Leia's Theme and A Window to the Past and Anakin's Theme by John Williams, The Breaking of the Fellowship and May it Be and The Return of the King by Howard Shore, Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap, Alleluia and Gaelic Blessing and God Be In My Head all from VC, Magnum Mysterium which I picked up from Kirby, The Islander and Koulema Tekke Taiteilijan (it's Finnish or Suomi) by Nightwish, 2 A.M. by Casey Driessen, I Got it Bad by Swing Speak - remember them? they used to come to Poplar Forest every year, when did they stop?)
*Star Wars (all albums)
*The White Album as played by Phish, is it bad I don’t have the Beatles playing it?
*New Playlist 1 (I discovered this cool function that everyone else probably already uses all the time to create a playlist on the fly - which is helpful since I don't have my computer here - this is of Spring Awakening since I forgot to add it into the Broadway playlist and I listen to it all the time)

Top 25 Most Played Songs:
1. MOST PLAYED - Bulería Soléa y Rumba (Maria Schneider)
2. Three Romances Part 2 Pas de Deux (Maria Schneider)
3. Three Romances Part 1 Choro Dançao (Maria Schneider)
4. Three RomancesPart 3 Dança Ilusória (Maria Schneider)
5. Hang Gliding (Maria Schneider)
6. Never Enough (Epica)
7. The Mirror-Blue Night (from Spring Awakening by Duncan Sheik)
8. Adyta (Epica)
9. All That's Known (Duncan Sheik)
10. I Believe (Duncan Sheik)
11. The Obsessive Devotion (Epica)
12. The Pretty Road (Maria Schneider)
13. Aires de Lando (Maria Schneider)
14. The Song of Purple Summer (Duncan Sheik)
15. The Guilty Ones (Duncan Sheik)
16. The Islander (Nightwish)
17. The Bitch of Living (Duncan Sheik)
18. Don't Do Sadness/Blue Wind (Duncan Sheik)
19. La'petach Chatat Rovetz: The Final Embrace (Epica)
20. Spring Awakening/Left Behind (Duncan Sheik)
21. 2 A.M. (Casey Driessen)
22. My Junk (Duncan Sheik)
23. Touch Me (Duncan Sheik)
24. December Ends (Enter the Haggis)
25. A Window to the Past (from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by John Williams)

Right before I go to bed, I generally watch one or two episodes of the many Good Eats episodes, two Iron Chef episodes or the one Oliver's Twist episode that I have on my iPod. Other than that, my choices of music depend entirely on my mood and how I feel at the time. While on El Camino de Santiago, for example, I would listen to things that sounded more befitting of the countryside as I walked through it enjoying the scenery such as Casey Driessen or Into the Woods (quite fitting indeed) or celtic traditional music. If I were, however, pounding up the side of the mountain and I needed some aggression and motivation I might listen to metal like Epica or Kamelot or Nightwish. If I were just relaxing or reading or walking through Salamanca I'd be likely to enjoy some Maria Schneider (particularly Buleria, Soléa y Rumba) and if I felt like some comedy I would be likely to listen to Avenue Q or Monty Python or PDQ Bach. It's entirely dependent on my mood, like ice cream flavors or satisfaction with the motivation of the United States public as a whole.

What I've listened to a lot less than I expected:
Jazz - Wynton Marsalis, Maynard Ferguson, Ellington, Basie Band, Miles Davis (I really just can't enjoy his stuff, maybe class overload), Mingus, Los Hombres Calientes
As I have pointed out before I feel like I understand Jazz really well but I might have just had an overload of it over the past couple of years - so much so that I got the feeling that I was missing out on listening to other stuff - so I picked up metal and Celtic and some Pop...

Surprise favorites:
@Justin Timberlake (after seeing him do live performances and comedy on SNL and listening to his music more, I've come to see him as a real musician and rather talented entertainer who really can sing and isn't insane and egotistical - I think I even saw him perform one time with Arturo Sandoval)
@Frida Soundtrack - Becca gave this to me, there's such a mystical quality to it with great songs in Spanish which is nice to practice here - I have listened to this a lot, particularly on El Camino de Santiago
@Leo Kottke – I don’t actually have any of his stuff on my iPod but it’s a very interesting story – as a child my parents had many tapes for me to listen to as I went to sleep and one of them was the story of Paul Bunyan, this particular version having as background music Leo Kottke. Well of course at the time I had no idea who that was but I loved the music. I used to listen to it just because of the lovely and uniquely rhythmed 12-string guitar in the background. It is lost somewhere in history, probably not even produced anymore. As I grew up sometime in high school I started listening to Prairie Home Companion and every once in a while the host, Garrison Keillor, would have on the show a guitar player that had a sound that I recognized very well – Leo Kottke! Every time I hear his stuff it makes me want to go and buy several of his albums and indeed while I’ve been here I’ve been finding every recording youtube.com holds of Mr. Kottke which happens to be a good variety.
@Casie Driessen (I love the bluegrassy sound with the variety of jazz)
@Bonnie Rideout - album Scottish Fire (I got this at the JMU music library, contrary to the album title it's a nice collection of rather relaxing Scottish folk songs)
@Jibbs - Is that Yo Chain? (the first time I heard this rap song it was a music video on MTV, I seriously thought it was a joke - it still makes me laugh. Do yo chain hang low, do it wobble to the flo', do it shine in the light, is it plat'num is it gold, could you throw it over ya shoulda, if you hot it make you cold - do yo chain hang low?)
@Sting and Cheb Mami - Desert Rose (I like the sound imitating a muslim muezzin - the guy who would go up on a high minaret and call the muslim town to prayer)
@Gentle Giant - particularly the Selections from 'Octupus' on their live album 'Playing the Fool Live' - incredible musicianship and mind-blowing ability to sing abstract counter melodies
@Béla Fleck and the Flecktones - Live at the Quick - just flat out awesomeness

And... that's about it. My mind works in strange and unusual ways, so that I actually have cravings for music in the way that pregnant women have cravings for pickles or ice cream. It's completely (or at least seemingly so) random and very specific. I never know what's coming next.