Content to see my garden grow, so sweet and full of someone else's flowers.
I love when it's time to swap mix CDs. On another forum, two or three times a year there's a thread where people sign up and get randomly matched to send swap mixes through the mail. Since music is never far from my mind, I plan and prep for these swaps during the off-season between threads, compiling, editing, and rejiggering playlists on my iPod for months at a time. In a way it helps me explore my own intimidating music collection -- I now have 21,888 songs on my player, most of which I've never heard, so deciding to make a bizarre 1920s jazz playlist (for example) encourages me to delve through the newer additions to my collection. But in another way, I simply enjoy swapping music with people. Even though most of the time my tastes don't gel with my partners' tastes, it's a tremendous amount of fun. (It's fun when I don't receive three hours of dull repetitive metal, that is.)
All of us in the current thread got matched with partners on Friday. After some last-minute edits, I burned and packaged four mixes for each of my three swap-mates: a psychedelic mix, a funk mix, an indie crap mix, and a "world" mix. I'm kind of proud how my playlists turned out. But even before I burned them to disk, I began making entirely new playlists. I'd worked on those four mixes since December, after all. It's time to start anew.
Trying to put together indie mixes can get frustrating. I have loads of the stuff, but I never seem to find enough bands with female vocalists. I may have read somewhere that indie attracts few women -- beard rock got its name for a reason. I love female vocals, especially when they aren't filtered or processed or glued onto a generic pop-machine beat. But for every Wye Oak and Warpaint and Lykke Li, there are two dozen MGMTs or Man Mans or Music Tapes.
I have more I want to add to the topic of ladies in music, but it's getting late and Jonny fell asleep early tonight. I'm not looking forward to him waking us up as it is.
All of us in the current thread got matched with partners on Friday. After some last-minute edits, I burned and packaged four mixes for each of my three swap-mates: a psychedelic mix, a funk mix, an indie crap mix, and a "world" mix. I'm kind of proud how my playlists turned out. But even before I burned them to disk, I began making entirely new playlists. I'd worked on those four mixes since December, after all. It's time to start anew.
Trying to put together indie mixes can get frustrating. I have loads of the stuff, but I never seem to find enough bands with female vocalists. I may have read somewhere that indie attracts few women -- beard rock got its name for a reason. I love female vocals, especially when they aren't filtered or processed or glued onto a generic pop-machine beat. But for every Wye Oak and Warpaint and Lykke Li, there are two dozen MGMTs or Man Mans or Music Tapes.
I have more I want to add to the topic of ladies in music, but it's getting late and Jonny fell asleep early tonight. I'm not looking forward to him waking us up as it is.