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Playlist

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I probably listen to whole albums most of the time – the whole album from start to finish without skipping tracks. Its just how I’ve always done since young. Every now and then though I throw together a bunch of “favourite tracks” into a playlist. Sitting at home yesterday was such an occasion.

There is never a theme for this – its tracks that I grew up with, tracks that I have always loved and maybe not loved the whole act / album, tracks that have certain memories, and just generally great tracks (in my mind anyway). No guilty pleasures, no 80s / 90s theme – just “bangin’ toons” as the youth probably don’t say…..

Anyway here goes this weeks list for your comments, derision, enjoyment, or whatever…. As I said, I don’t see them as guilty pleasures (no guilt here) and don’t care if they are not “cool”.

So what’s on your “bangin’ toons” playlist ?

– Angel Eyes / Wet Wet Wet
– Life Is Long / David Byrne & Brian Eno
– Superstition / Stevie Wonder
– Rule The World / Take That
– Right By Your Side / Eurythmics
– Ghost At Number One / Jellyfish
– Blood Makes Noise / Suzanne Vega
– Nikita / Elton John
– Coming Up Close / ’Til Tuesday
– Ladykiller / Nicky Holland
– Millennium / Robbie Williams
– Jesusland / Ben Folds
– Breakout / Swing Out Sister
– Waltzinblack / The Stranglers
– Change / Lisa Stansfield
– Temptation / Heaven 17
– Rulers, Ruling All Things / Midlake
– Nobody’s Diary / Yazoo
– Mystery Girl / Roy Orbison
– Jennifer She Said / Lloyd Cole & The Commotions
– Skyfall /Adele
– Huckleberry Grove / Ocean Colour Scene
– The Shouting Stage / Joan Armatrading
– As I Lay Me Down / Sophie B Hawkins
– Wasting My Young Years / London Grammar
– Soak Up The Sun / Sheryl Crow
– Moments In Love / The Art Of Noise
– Oblivious / Aztec Camera
– Private Dancer / Tina Turner
– Never Never / The Assembly
– Good Thing / Fine Young Cannibals

And with the obligatory YouTube clip of one of the tracks, picked at random…..

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Comments

  2. I’m the same with most of my listening done with full albums but, since getting ‘whole house’ music streaming about 15 years ago, I’ve been a playlist fan, they’re especially handy when you have people round. Most of my Sonos playlists last at least 5 hours and, as there’s very little or no duplication, it’s easy to stitch two together if necessary. All these lists (except the christmas one) are completely theme free….although I do have a segment on one where there are 10 songs in a row with a day of the week in the title – nobody has noticed yet!
    For themed playlists, I’ve recently turned to Spotify. I’ve discovered several new artists from the “discover weekly” one which in the old days would have been called ‘if you like that, try this’. I do like the Americana one and I’m very taken by the new one that popped up last week called Indigo I only bothered with it because a Paste Magazine article explained it but I’m sure it would suit other Afterworders as well – I believe the Indigo is a reference to the colour of denim.

  5. I love a playlist. I hardly ever play whole albums these days, the exception being new releases.
    I must make about 5 new playlists each week of varying lengths, it keeps me off the streets.
    A friend and I exchange 5 tracks each week via Spotify and I collect all the tracks in a giant playlist for each year. There’s no overarching theme, it’s just tracks that have grabbed me during the week. This is the one for 2020, so far.

  6. I switch between listening to full albums and playlists all the time. I have loads of Spotify playlists plus a similar number of Google Play ones too. The problem is managing them all so that it’s easy to find what I want quickly. Spotify’s playlist folders helps a bit but it could be easier.
    I have some playlists created by musical theme or sub genre and others that fit a particular mood or time of day. For example, I have a set of playlists for dinner time, when you don’t necessarily want a load of heavy beats causing you indigestion. I also use the Discover Weekly list on Spotify. Any tracks that I particularly like are added to my own Discover Favourites list so that I don’t forget them. There’s a neat little site called Discover Quickly which helps you review quickly your Discover Weekly list and add selected tracks to your own playlist :

    https://discoverquickly.com

    • I like the look of that Discover Quickly page – thanks.
      As good as Spotify is [leaving aside the thorny issue of artist royalties] and it is very good – had you told my 16 year old self, ‘one day, guess what you’ll be able to do?’, I would have peed my pants with excitement – but like anything there is loads of room for improvement. I especially hate it when I go to an artist page [let’s use Bob Dylan as an example] and there are hundreds of albums/singles/compilations etc to scroll through, I’d love it if there were hyperlinks at the top of the page to allow me to skip to compilations, or playlists or singles. One day…

      • I went through the 30 day trials of all the major streaming services before settling on Spotify purely on the basis of the Android app being the one that suited me best….but that is the best of a bad bunch.

  7. I honestly didn’t know how many playlists I had made from my iTunes, but I’ve just counted them. Or I should say I’ve just counted half of them, cos I’d had enough by the time I got to 200 and it looked like I was only halfway through, so something in the region of 400. There are quite a few that are just various artist CDs, where I find it easier to make them into a playlist, so they are easy to find on my iPods, but the others are a mixture of

    – my favourite tracks by a particular artist

    – my favourite tracks in a particular genre

    – some themes, like decades or Peel Sessions

    – alternative albums, using the same tracklist, but different versions, like alternative takes, demos or live versions

    – a sweep up of B-Sides or non-album tracks for various artists

    – a compilation of all the tracks that a specific artist (almost all are rappers) has been a featured artist on. I’ve done 22 of these and 3 have more than 200 tracks.

    – compilations of unreleased tracks by specific artists – the Prince one has 145 tracks, but this keeps reducing as the tracks are issued officially (and sound much better)

    – a playlist of various songs that I stick on if we have a party – not ‘party’ tracks, I hasten to add

    – compilations of the best remixes by specific artists – I think I have copies of every mix officially released by Depeche Mode (although @black-celebration might be able to prove otherwise!) and Pet Shop Boys, so those playlists are quite lengthy

    – compilation of live tracks by specific artists – to do this I put every live track I have by each artist into separate playlists and then went through and picked my favourite version of each song, occasionally picking more than one version if I couldn’t choose (eg a band version and an acoustic version). Seriously, these playlists took absolutely ages to make, particularly Dylan and the Stones, where I have a couple of thousand live tracks by each. Dylan, of course, sounds very different at various stages in his career, as do the songs, but I’ve got a mixture of older and newer versions and the playlist works better than I thought it would. Trawling through 40-50 versions of Satisfaction or Like a Rolling Stone wasn’t as much fun as it sounds, so I quickly moved to just picking the first version that sounded good.

    – and then there are the three most important playlists – best rap (long version), which runs to over a thousand tracks and is where I’ve picked the best 1 or 2 tracks from every rap artist, best rap (short version), my 193 favourite rap tracks and, the daddy of them all, Paul’s Favourites, which, you guessed it, is my electronic equivalent of John Peel’s box of favourite singles. It contains 644 tracks, by such titans as The Beatles, Kendrick Lamar, Bowie, Velvet Underground…Alvin Stardust, David Soul, Jim Dale, Chas and Dave… It’s only ever listened to by me, so I don’t have to pander to any pretence of being cool. If I like it loads, in it goes. I suppose this is the nearest I have to a list of (what I think are) bangers. I won’t list them all(!), but the first three are Bowie’s Absolute Beginners, The Beatles’ Across The Universe (The WWF version) and After All by The Frank and Walters, whereas the last three are 29 Palms by Robert Plant, 7:30 by Pernice Brothers and 99 Problems by Ice-T.

    Here’s the powerpoptastic 7:30, complete with a Turtles-like ‘pa-pa-pa’ outro.

      • Thing is, I tend not to listen to playlists that often, particularly at the moment, as I’m doing my albums ranking project, so I’m working my way through all of those. Just finished 1977. Pink Floyd’s Animals was a clear winner. Love that album. It’s the album I am most likely to stick on if I am away for the night and want something to accompany my night time reading. Even then, despite listening to it regularly over the past 40 years, and pretty much knowing all the words, I’d still struggle to tell you which track was Dogs, Sheep or Pigs. Really looking forward to the Immersion Box that we keep getting teased with. The bootlegs I have of the tours for that album are good quality, but not as good as the albums I have from their other tours, so it would be nice to have one officially released and cleaned up.

        Edit: sorry, I should have said that a lot of those tracks in your playlist are new to me. In fact, a lot of the artists are too. I can never resist a list, so I’ll have a listen through it later. What are the highlights? Apart from Spanish Stroll and Promised Land, both of which are in my ‘favourites’ playlist. Some of the tracks look like they may fit on my Radio Bob playlist.

        • Tough to choose but current favourites are:

          It’s Better To Have and Don’t Need – Don Covay
          No More Doggin’ – Rosco Gordon
          Jesus Gave Me Water – Sam Cooke & The Soul Stirrers
          Small Town Talk – Bobby Charles
          Mardi Gras Mambo – The Hawketts
          Soul Shoes – Graham Parker

          and a special shoutout for ‘I Want A Bow Legged Woman’ by Bullmoose Jackson, which couldn’t be more politically incorrect if it tried.

    • 29 palms is an absolute belter. Just out of curiosity though you ha e put number at the end it seems whereas I would out them at the beginning. A first Wotld problem it seems- you are most likely right as iTunes puts them at the end too.

      • Yes, it’s down to the way iTunes does it. I have all my CD listed on an excel spreadsheet for the insurance, and to stop me from buying things I already own, and on that I put them first. Actually, excel sorts them first as well.

        Of course, then you get the tracks where the numbers are spelled out. I try to remain true to however the tracks are written on the record, so Macca’s Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five is written as that. I’m actually quite pedantic about my iTunes library. I’ve spent way, way more time that any sane person would, tidying up the tracks. I have every word starting with a capital letter, any additional information, such as the name of the remix or names of featured performers, put in square brackets, rather than the curved brackets, which are just for the track name, e.g. (Get A) Grip (On Yourself).

        However, this has been tested in recent years with artists getting all precious and issuing records with all the writing in lower case or upper case. Reluctantly, I go along with what the artist has done, but I make a mental note that the artist is a bit up themself. And then you get the artists’ names themselves. The rappers Kid Cudi and Schoolboy Q are KiD CuDi and ScHoolboy Q, the daft SoDs.

      • Sorry, and 29 Palms is fab isn’t it. I’m not particularly a fan of Plant, or Led Zeppelin…well, or rock music really. I just like bits and pieces. I was just sat in the car one day, in Rochdale of all places, waiting for my then girlfriend, who was doing a course (she’s an ITU nurse, or was at the time) and it came on the radio. I don’t normally listen to the radio, because I have a real aversion to radio DJs (apart from Brian Matthew, he was brill), but the sodding DJ never said who it was at the end, and I wasn’t paying attention at the beginning. So I had to grit my teeth and listen to the radio for a few days till it came on again.

        Actually, around the same time I had heard Smells Like Teen Spirit on some TV show, but again hadn’t paid any attention to who it was. So the next day I’m stood in Piccadilly Records in Manchester, trying to recreate the sound of the song, without knowing any of the words (to be honest, I’m still not sure what the words are) and only having a vague recollection of the melody. The first two assistants thought I had escaped from Ashworth, but the third one had watched the same TV show and steered me in the right direction (to the record, not back to Ashworth).

  8. Here’s my usual playlist of my favourite tunes of the year, limited to one track per act and capped to 100 tracks, so it’s one-in-one-out for anything new that gets added.

  9. To the surprise of not one single person in The Universe I hate playlists. Since around 1971 I also can’t listen to radio music stations (unless Donald Fagen is the DJ). Just play an album all the way through won’t you (and none of that Tiggs’ nonsense re messing about with track listings)?
    Also, where do you weirdos find the time to compile playlists never mind collate the stupid things? Are you all like obsessed with music??

    • I only ever listen to playlists now. Usually on shuffle. “Everything I Like”, “Favourites”, “Absolute Favourites”, “Current Favourites” and “Reggae Favourites” are my favourites. Who wants to listen to a whole album of just one artist for half an hour? Not me, no siree, life’s too short and boring as is, thank you very much. I have a muso friend who moans about this attitude. “A lot of thought went into the track sequencing” he says, the pompous nincompoop. “Yeah? Well how come Pink Floyd release tracks from Dark Side on their compilation albums then, eh? eh?” I reply, with sage awareness and cred intact.

    • Been there, done that! I had about 45,000 tracks though and it took ages, a few years in fact, but that’s because I just did it whilst I was working and I had a couple of months gap between two jobs. Trying to concentrate on my work with Metal Machine Music playing was quite difficult, but there were a few difficult parts if I’m honest. I think I’d reached The Carpenters before I put my foot down and decided I didn’t have to listen to my wife’s music. I have 136,343 tracks now and I’m not doing it again.

      I’m doing another daft project now, but this one is much more enjoyable. Well, several projects at the same time, to be more precise. It keeps my brain ticking over and stops me from getting bored, although I only really get bored when I’m being made to do something I don’t want to do.

      • If anyone had done it I suspected it would be you, Paul, your commitment to these mammoth projects is impressive – and useful for when my wife [‘my wife’] suggests that I’m spending too much time ‘faffing about on the computer’, I show her one of your posts –
        I might just try it myself if this situation goes on long enough

        • Yeah, I don’t necessarily tell my wife, all of my projects. Sometimes, the less she knows about what I get up to the better, otherwise she might start asking why the hall ceiling still hasn’t been painted, whilst I’m sitting here making a list of my 100 favourite Elvis tracks, which is actually what have been spending the last hour doing. I’ve done around 25 of these over the past few days and it’s been quite fun actually, even if nobody else is ever going to see them, unless I take an offer up to write on a friend of a friend’s blog.

          Actually, that’s not true, as one of my mate’s will see one of them, the Bob Dylan one, cos that’s what I was originally tasked with. I just took it upon myself to do another 24 whilst I was at it. I did a solo Beatles one yesterday, which is why the Ringo tracks were fresh in my mind for the discussion above (I didn’t let on that I also love Ringo’s version of Whispering Grass from Sentimental Journey!). And the Stones one I did this morning had two cover versions in the top four (You Better Move On & Just My Imagination), which I was surprised about, as I’d never really thought about it before, but I just think those two tracks are great and, dare I say it, better than the originals, or at least the Arthur Alexander one is anyway.

          But if you are going to take that project on, be prepared for what you are letting yourself in for. If you’re anything like me and obsessively collect things you could find yourself stuck for two solid days listening to remixes of the same song. I’m a big fan of Pet Shop Boys, The KLF and Frankie GTH, among others, and some of their tracks can have 20+ different remixes, particularly The KLF, where I have stacks of unofficial remixes. Similarly, when I did it I had a healthy collection of live Stones albums/bootlegs, and their set list doesn’t change much. I think I would have struggled if I’d have had all the Dylan live albums that I have now, with the release of all those whopping boxed sets that I bought. But if you do start it, don’t give up when you get to an artist that you have loads by and can’t see past. Just in B I had the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to get through. And be prepared to rediscover loads of things you haven’t heard for years. That was a fun part.

    • 3 tracks that should have been there were not available on Spotify.

      James Brown – Bring It On

      .
      The Surf Champlers – Toshin Doi

      .
      Was (Not Was) – Spy In The House Of Love (only available on Spotty as a horrible remix version. Completely unacceptable)

  13. It’s my birthday today, and for the last couple of years I’ve amused myself with a One Track Per Year (while not re-using artists from previous years) playlist, here’s what I came up with this year…

    Going out on a limb here, but it’s very probably the best selection of music going from the Rolling Stones – via Magazine, Dr Feelgood, 808 State, REM, Parliament, Eric B and Rakim, Daft Punk and the Afghan Whigs – to an appropriately titled song from the brand new Hannah Barberas album that you’ll hear today.

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