Drive-by Memeing

I've been Meme-ed. Travis has sent along his music meme, and I've decided to both answer and pass it along to one or two others.

1. How much music do I have?

I dumped every CD I own into the server at home and rip a copy of every CD I buy. So far I have 4220 songs in the Jukebox for a total of 12.4Gig. Assume 8 songs/CD and that's ~528 CDs. Given that I am largely non-musical, I figure that's a lot.

2. What was the last CD I bought?

I bought a set of songs and guitar solos by Tupahn, an itinerant troubadour I've heard in a few places.

3. What am I listening to right now?

PNN radio webcast. They're having a "70's Flashback". I'm generally listening to something I pick up on live365 where I bought a VIP membership a few years back.

4. Name five songs that mean a lot to me.

This is a tough call for me. I hear little snippets of music all the time, over and over, so almost any piece of music can help me recall just about any life-event. Narrowing it down to 5 is very tough, but here are my choices

The South Side of the Sky - Yes. I don't know why, I just love this song. It does a great job of putting the right visuals in my head when I hear it and I can really imagine myself lost in the mountains, freezing to death. I have been known to replay this song for hours.

Papa was a Rolling Stone - Tempations. I grew up in Detroit so the surprise is not that this is here, the surprise is that all my choices aren't Motown songs. I heard this song a lot and it took me a while to understand what it was really about, and when I did, I realized it was trying to tell me something.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. When I was working on my fractal turbulence paper in grad school, I would sit up in my room and listen to Mozart over and over to make the task more bearable. Now whenever I hear it, I remember those times vastly more fondly than they actually were.

Bad, Bad Leory Brown - Jim Croce. Okay, more motown. I just remember this as a hell of a lot of fun.

The Letter- The Box Tops. This is the first song I really remember, start to finish. The whole musical score is a part of my cognative development in a weird synaesthesic way. The song for me has a physical shape, a set of colors and other weird properties unlike any other music. And I re-expereince it everytime I hear it, but not as strongly as when I was a kid (I can actually feel the shape of it as I write this, it's indescribable). I must have got it in my head at some critical brain development phase becuase it's lodged in there deeply.

Bonus Song

It's Raining Men - The Weathergirls. I hate this song. It makes me physically ill to hear it. It's the most overplayed, over-hyped, stereotypical bucket of diarrheatic haggis imaginable. Which makes it meaningful, just not in the good way.

I'm now passing this meme onto Geoff, my son.