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5 songs not on Spotify
Jan. 4th, 2024 01:17 amThis past year I've done a lot of attempted digital dragonhoarding - I bought a semi-ancient e-reader in May (her name's Eleanora, she's a Sony PRS-300 with no touchscreen, she's very slow, and I love her) and worked on organizing a bunch of epubs to suit my very particular tastes. More recently I've gotten into music with a similar philosophy of categorization! I... haven't quite gotten there, to be honest. I dug up my old MP3 players and found various issues, and the organization just isn't there; I haven't found a Calibre equivalent in terms of just letting me dig in my fingers and getting all the metadata just how I want easily.
I also bought new a $20 MP3 player off of Ebay, and it's kind of astoundingly bad! I had no idea that there were modern devices that ignore track number and just play the songs alphabetically! (While paying attention to the album name in the metadata as opposed to eg the folder name, no less.) I tried to return it but they were like 'What if we just refunded you 70%' and well, I took it.
Despite its (many, additional) flaws I've been putting a ton of music on the little guy, and having access to even this much customizability has been really great! So: here's a handful of songs that I wouldn't be listening to very much without it, in no particular order and with no particular extra criteria.
1. Treshornyboys's "Crystal Kingdom" cover
This is one of my favorite - to borrow a descriptor from Dementancora - 'goodsounds'. It's made of good noises!! It's just really really pretty. And I never got to listen to it extensively before except losing a few hours once or twice to manually restarting it every time.
2. "The Words of God" by Catherine Faber (though I've always known it as "God Wrote the Rocks")
This one would have wrecked me if I'd found it while I was still Christian. As is, it still doesn't leave me entirely unwrecked? The solstice version of the lyrics really doesn't hit me like that but I understand this to be a widely-held opinion and I guess I can accept it as doing its own thing. And of course it's well documented elsewhere that I'm a real sucker for a good flute solo.
3. "The Shadow Lover" by Mercedes Lackey & Heather Alexander
This is another one here on goodsounds grounds; I haven't read any Valdemar (though I read the first two books of the The Black Gryphon series a few times throughout high school). When I finally get around to picking up ASFTV it'll probably be because I was listening to this. I was thinking earlier today about how great it would be if more stories had their own soundtracks - both like this where it's actually about the thing, and the way Smeyer does it with canonical playlists of existing songs. The world would be better if more people did this.
4. "Íþróttaálfurinn" by I guess Magnús Scheving?? I feel like someone else probably both wrote and dubbed this but I'm not going to bother to find out at 1 am
It's a goal of mine to someday know how to sing at least one full song in many many languages, and this is the one that origin of that goal! For some reason it's a lot funnier to hear all the whooshing noises edited in when it's an MP3.
5. "I'm Always Seeing You (Do Cool Stuff)" by Nish Kumar and Mark Watson
I have no idea what people who aren't into Taskmaster will think of this one but it was such a delight in the context of the season. Nish is one of my very favorite contestants and it was so great and surprising to discover that, wow, he's really pretty good at music actually.
This is an ongoing project of mine, and I would definitely be happy to receive recs! Let me know what's out there; I know there's a lot of great stuff that I'd never be able to find on my own.
I also bought new a $20 MP3 player off of Ebay, and it's kind of astoundingly bad! I had no idea that there were modern devices that ignore track number and just play the songs alphabetically! (While paying attention to the album name in the metadata as opposed to eg the folder name, no less.) I tried to return it but they were like 'What if we just refunded you 70%' and well, I took it.
Despite its (many, additional) flaws I've been putting a ton of music on the little guy, and having access to even this much customizability has been really great! So: here's a handful of songs that I wouldn't be listening to very much without it, in no particular order and with no particular extra criteria.
1. Treshornyboys's "Crystal Kingdom" cover
This is one of my favorite - to borrow a descriptor from Dementancora - 'goodsounds'. It's made of good noises!! It's just really really pretty. And I never got to listen to it extensively before except losing a few hours once or twice to manually restarting it every time.
2. "The Words of God" by Catherine Faber (though I've always known it as "God Wrote the Rocks")
This one would have wrecked me if I'd found it while I was still Christian. As is, it still doesn't leave me entirely unwrecked? The solstice version of the lyrics really doesn't hit me like that but I understand this to be a widely-held opinion and I guess I can accept it as doing its own thing. And of course it's well documented elsewhere that I'm a real sucker for a good flute solo.
3. "The Shadow Lover" by Mercedes Lackey & Heather Alexander
This is another one here on goodsounds grounds; I haven't read any Valdemar (though I read the first two books of the The Black Gryphon series a few times throughout high school). When I finally get around to picking up ASFTV it'll probably be because I was listening to this. I was thinking earlier today about how great it would be if more stories had their own soundtracks - both like this where it's actually about the thing, and the way Smeyer does it with canonical playlists of existing songs. The world would be better if more people did this.
4. "Íþróttaálfurinn" by I guess Magnús Scheving?? I feel like someone else probably both wrote and dubbed this but I'm not going to bother to find out at 1 am
It's a goal of mine to someday know how to sing at least one full song in many many languages, and this is the one that origin of that goal! For some reason it's a lot funnier to hear all the whooshing noises edited in when it's an MP3.
5. "I'm Always Seeing You (Do Cool Stuff)" by Nish Kumar and Mark Watson
I have no idea what people who aren't into Taskmaster will think of this one but it was such a delight in the context of the season. Nish is one of my very favorite contestants and it was so great and surprising to discover that, wow, he's really pretty good at music actually.
This is an ongoing project of mine, and I would definitely be happy to receive recs! Let me know what's out there; I know there's a lot of great stuff that I'd never be able to find on my own.
