it's ending

my vampire weekend station has repeated at least three separate songs since the afternoon. it's not like i've had it on the whole time either; maybe three hours total. this is where i start to check out. i had been thinking the playlists were deeper, but it still looks like the equivalent of loading up a 10-disc changer and hitting random. not that you'd hear the same song from the same album twice if you did that.

while the shallow playlists seem ridiculous in the internet era (cf last.fm, where you will be slowly barraged with new artists and hear multiple alternate versions of familiar songs), what if there was a service that would let you pick any five discs and hit random? a virtual cd-changer. a niche, throwback, but controllable product. it's sad that a company that pays teams of music experts to tear apart tracks in their minute elements is basically giving us the same thing--but where we pick one artist and hope the other five we'll hear endlessly are worth it.

wilco!

it's a proud moment for the vampire weekend station.

too bad they still show up all the time, and that the next song that played after that one turned out to be death cab, which proves that i might have made the wrong list.

so far today:

vampire weekend x4
cake x2
modest mouse x2
ok go x1
wilco x2
the shins x1
the killers x2
the kooks x1
the strokes x2
death cab x2
cwk x1
the eels x1
andrew bird x1
arctic monkeys x1
and suddenly...johnny cash x1

that's 16 of 24 songs from seven artists, with one big surprise - cash - that is impressive but does not fit the mood. the killers popped up twice after initially surprising me with their appearance, so perhaps i just haven't been watching the track logs carefully.

strangers no more

i have to say, in my most recent experience, pandora is doing a better job of playing more than one song by a given artist. however, there is still this problem where my vampire weekend station is really only going to play them, the shins, cake, modest mouse, the strokes, and the eels. every third or fourth song will not be one of those bands. however, scrolling back through the past hour or so of music, there's one stretch where two songs in a row did *not* come from that list. that is insane. i just heard another cake song, and now arctic monkeys...so the next song will turn out to be...

wizards-bulls excitement

i had thought all the interesting players had left the wizards, but no. there was:

mike miller's single-sleeve t-shirt
josh howard, who unfortunately left with a (hopefully short-term) injury
oh boy, oberto coming out of the game immediately after i said i would get angry if they removed him
the blatche vs mcgee question, which i could not answer
t-shirts parachuting from the rafters (i really had not seen that ever)
the punch cam, which confused at least half the people who were on it
earl boykins making pargo fall down trying to defend him
the wizards winning and seeming to demonstrate that the bulls do not have that great of a team right now

i'm a love letter away

pandora just played the best voxtrot song ever. i have a copy of it somewhere, from the 'strangely alluring mysterious band that posted this mp3' days. despite all my efforts to reclaim it from past hard drives, it remains elusive. so i have to give them some credit for playing it, even if last night i was listening to a shins album thinking 'the shins are annoying me. i blame pandora.'

Pandora challenge, Feb edition

First, a moment of thanks for the safe return of my iPod, which spent a week in snow and emerged holding some measure of a charge and fully functional.

Since this is a new month, and the internet is cooperating, I remembered today the great challenge of the moment: can I run out of free Pandora listening time before I get sick of the frequently repeating music?

So far, I have been listening to a Vampire Weekend station. I have heard a lot of songs I have heard on Pandora before. At the moment, I am not sick of them, but I do cringe a little, because Pandora has a knack for ruining my relationship with songs, and I can see that looming moment when I have to give it up yet again.