Music Vs Feet
Posted on | May 26, 2008 at 12:17 pm | Comments Off
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 54°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Ditch Digger” (Anne Summers)
- “Cream and Bastards Rise” (Harvey Danger)
- “Tristesse” (The Church)
- “In the Core of a Flame” (The Go-Betweens)
- “You Don’t Live Long Enough” (Winterpills)
- “Good News For The Pus Pickers” (The Danielson Famile)
- “Hate” (Moist)
Yes, I jogged today even though it’s a holiday and I slept in. And even though I was a bit sore from all the walking I did yesterday to go down to Coors Field for N’s company picnic and the Rockies game. (The Rockies beat the Mets 4-1, BTW – yeah! The game was pretty boring though, with very few hits. In fact, I think it tied the Coors Field record for fewest hits.) But when I got up this morning, it was 54 degrees and cloudy. It had rained some during the night. I just couldn’t pass up that kind of jogging weather! I’m glad I did it.
Once again, it made me realize how much the music being played on my iPod during the run affects it. To remind everyone how this playlist works, I have run all my MP3s through a BPM (Beats Per Minute) analyzer and recorded the results in iTunes. This “Fast Tempo” playlist in iTunes randomly picks 6GB of songs that are 125 BPM (or faster) and less than four and a half minutes in length to fill my iPod nano video. I go through this random playlist sequentially while I’m running, which is pretty much the only thing I use that iPod for. So I really never know what’s going to come up next. There are some 20,000 songs in iTunes for it to pick from, though far less than that have the right BPM and song length. I frequently find that when I’m running, my stride will match the tempo of the song currently playing, which is why I like listening to fast songs when I run. But then again, I prefer fast songs in general.
The opening song by Anne Summers (which is a band, not a person) is pretty snappy, and it got the run off to a good clip. And then the Harvey Danger song, which is really good, cemented that. At first, I almost thought it was a New Pornographers song. I love “Tristesse” by The Church, and it comes from my favorite Church album, but it’s slower (and the volume is lower) than the proceeding songs. Near the end of it, I was getting to the halfway point of the run and was starting to slow down. It was just the right time for the Go-Betweens song (which should really be called “The Right Word”) to show up, as that re-energized me and helped me get up one of the hills on the run. Although since it comes from an older CD, the volume is pretty low on that one too. (The iPod’s “sound check” feature, which is supposed to equalize volumes, really doesn’t work very well.)
Then the Winterpills song was up. That was the first song during the run that I didn’t recognize at all and I had no idea who the artist was. Although the beginning instrumental part of it sounded like an Al Stewart song from one of his very early albums. The song mixes sparse/slow parts with faster/noisier bits, which makes for a schizophrenic running experience. I was starting to run out of energy again and it didn’t help much, though it’s a pretty song.
And then… The Danielson Famile: “Good News For The Pus Pickers” . Oh boy. That song was from an album I downloaded from eMusic because some people I trusted liked them and I thought I better check them out. I didn’t like it enough to download any more of their stuff – too weird. I couldn’t figure out who it was until I got home and checked the playlist. My best guess was The Fiery Furnaces. The vocals are extremely irritating, especially the really high ones, and the tempo bounces all over the place, which does not make it an ideal running song. My feet didn’t know what to do. Nevertheless, parts of the song were catchy and I found myself actually somewhat enjoying hearing it out of context from the rest of the album. At this point I was coming into the home stretch of the run and was just focused on getting through it.
The last song was from Moist, who showed up on the previous run as well. What’s up with that? Well, I do have all three of my Moist CDs in iTunes for some reason. This is another song that alternates slowness and sparseness with sudden bombasticity – Moist is a leftover from that loud/soft dynamics grungy Nirvana era. Not an ideal song to end the run on. I needed something somewhat familiar and snappier to fuel me through that last quarter mile or so. But again, at that point I was just focusing on running through the pain. My muscles still ain’t up to snuff after the illness-induced jogging hiatus. So I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the music. The playlist started out strong and then petered out for the last half. I could’ve really used that extra musical boost near the end like the one the Go-Betweens song provided for me at mid-run. I really miss the Go-Betweens.
Happy Memorial Day! May all your running be running from something important.
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “in the throes of love’s young dream”.