New tram tune

I’ve got a new tram-to-office tune! 

As I explained in Too much music, I’m a terrible creature of habit on whom 16 GB of iPod space is completely wasted, as I usually switch to one of two tunes for the walking part of my commute. Well, all that changed this morning.

For once, I hadn’t even wired up for the tram journey, as I had a gripping novel to finish. I love reading – I could make that the subject of an entry, or even an entire blog, one day – but it’s rare that I allow myself fiction on the tram, as I’m such a plot junkie that it is too painful to put the book aside and return to the real world on arrival. As it happened, the end of today’s read was something of a disappointment, as I was able to discover (with serendipitous timing, due partly to a tramway technical glitch) just one stop before the end of my journey. I don’t know what made me get the iPod out for only the less-than-five-minute tram-to-office trot, and even less what made me need to listen to a different song.

This time I will reveal what the song is, in the hope of introducing the genius of Oysterband to people who have not yet had the opportunity. My family discovered this band several years ago, but for some reason I had only really got into one album, Here I Stand. Recently I pushed myself to expand my repertoire, and discovered the album The Shouting End of Life, and in particular latched on to the song ‘Everywhere I Go’.

I like Oysterband for their variety – their lyrical love songs, rollicking dance tunes, and political, anti-establishment rants. ‘Everywhere I Go’ falls into the latter category; it is about, as I understand it, the confusion and contradictions of the world we live in, and how we are manipulated by the powers-that-be. The chorus is as follows:*

‘Everywhere I go I see what’s going on

And the more I see, the less I know.’

Here is my favourite line:

‘And the food we eat won’t go bad

But the cows are mad and the chickens glow

They want to tell you this, they want to sell you that

Just hold your hat when the black wind blows’

This song has an invigorating, driving rhythm and pulsating cello line, which along with its angry lyrics are fantastically energising, perfect for my morning commute. The only problem, if it can be called a problem, is that it is followed by a beautiful ballad called ‘Put Out the Lights’. This song can make me cry, for two reasons: 1) its combination of poignant lyrics and harmonic progressions mysteriously provoke certain biochemical reactions within my organism; 2) Someone very close to me (previously mentioned in my Waiting for the end and Christmas entries) suggested this song as a possible funeral choice. This has resulted in me having to hide tears on the tram on more than one occasion, but then this is not the only song (or stimulus) to have this effect. Luckily, repeated exposure is making me less sensitive to its effects (a little like the treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder perhaps).

This is also helped by the fact that it is followed, two tracks later, by one of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard: ‘Don’t Slit Your Wrists for Me’. Set to a rollicking, Celtic-like dance tune, it is about a girl with ‘…rings on her fingers and a bone stuck through her nose … wearing studs in places where the gardener never goes…’ rejecting the advances of a hormonal young man:

‘And I wouldn’t say I couldn’t be a lover

Not if there was nothing else to be

But if love is what you’re dying to discover, darling

Don’t slit your wrists for me’

This song has had me grinning to myself, or even giggling out loud on the tram. By the time my iPod has fed me these few tracks, my fellow commuters must be wondering if I’m really safe to be let out on my own in public. The joys of personal, portable music . . .

* All lyrics copyright the Oysterband, quoted without permission but with evident admiration and appreciation. I am fully aware of the dodgy ground of quoting song lyrics by authors still-living or not sufficiently dead, and am taking the risk as I think it is blindingly obvious that my doing so cannot possibly have a negative effect on the respective musicians' income or reputation, and is clearly not for personal gain. To paraphrase the approach of the great political musicologist Philip Tagg: so sue me.

Too much music...in my head

As a little addendum to my Too much music entry, here’s what happened on the tram yesterday morning. I was wired for sound as usual when, a few stops into the journey, a distant acquaintance got on and made eye contact. I immediately unplugged my ears, and we exchanged greetings and brief small-talk about how late we were both running. The conversation rapidly petered out, and he started playing with his phone; I didn’t want to force it, especially in what was a foreign language for him, but I felt it rude to definitively turn my back and re-plug. So I left him with the option of talking further if he so desired – in my experience, some people like to practice their English when the opportunity arises – and contented myself with mental musings in the meantime.

As it happened, nothing more was said until our leave-taking as we descended from the tram. It was only then that I realized that the music I had been listening to previously was still playing – in my head. A part of the chorus, at least, was spinning round around in my mental audio machine, rather like the way snippets of songs do on restless nights when my brain is too active to sleep.

So I tried an experiment; I deliberately made the mental switch to one of my habitual tram-stop-to-office tunes (as detailed in Too much music). With very little conscious effort on my part, the song proceeded to play to the virtual ears of my brain, relatively complete in structure and texture. It was quite remarkable.

This set me thinking; perhaps this current cultural glut of wiring and memory space, as discussed in Technology in my pocket, is just a temporary stage in human evolution, a stepping stone to help train us to access and utilize the 90% or whatever of our brain capacity that is currently redundant (or is that an urban myth?). Then we will be using our own multi-GB memory space, and be able to render visual and aural mental images so vivid and accurate that external play-back equipment will be redundant.

Or, rather more likely, exercise of my over-exposed musical memory is pushing other, more functional stuff out of my head, like pin numbers and to-do lists. Oh well – at least I know I shan't be too bothered when the iPod battery is flat.

Too much music

To follow on from my Technology in my pocket entry, the phenomenon of personal, portable music has always raised questions in my mind. Don’t get me wrong: I love music, I need music, and have probably devoted far more of my life to it than the average listener. But the extent to which private music seems to have become so irrevocably associated with public transport, for such a large proportion of every tram/train/busload, sometimes does bother me. I fully understand the boredom and isolation of the morning commute, and the need for something to help gear up for, or help forget, the working day ahead. However, when it reaches the extent that listeners plug in even when traveling with friends, and retain their headphones when conversing, something is wrong.

I am not one of these people that put their headphones on with their clothes in the morning. Sometimes I find the close quarters of in-ear sound claustrophobic, and if I do decide to "wire up" I am so paranoid about disturbing others that sometimes I can barely hear my music over the thumping machines of fellow commuters.  Other days, I can’t wait to get to the tram stop before I'm trying to untangle headphone wires.  Then I switch off from the world and let the music take me where it will. 

I grew up with the Sony Walkman tape player, in model if not actual brand, used mainly for long school trips and the very rare occasions when I rejected my parent’s choice of car stereo music (not often necessary – my parents have excellent musical taste). Early in my working-commute career I dabbled with a mini-disc player (remember those?), then my first foray into mp3s was via a free-upgrade mobile phone. I only invested in a cheap mp3 player so I could continue learning Spanish on the plane to Mexico (either flight mode had not yet been invented, or – more likely – I hadn’t heard of it).

That cheap mp3 player served me well, eating AAA batteries and in return feeding me 256 megabytes of my favorite tunes (or language courses). However, as commuting life really kicked in, I found that I sometimes couldn’t find quite the right tune for the moment. As with so many gadgets before, I descended into the inevitable spiral of convincing myself that I needed, and deserved, something more. In short, I started hankering after an iPod.

I did the usual agonizing and waiting, carefully weighing the options and selecting a reasonable model. I knew 6-year-olds that owned iPods. Even my parents had invested in one for traveling. Surely it was my turn? Finally, when subtle (obviously too subtle) hints one birthday season came to nothing, I treated myself.

So now I have the choice of hundreds of songs to feed my ears on the go. There is undeniably something to suit every occasion and mood. BUT here is the crazy thing; ninety-nine percent of the time, I listen to the same few favorite songs, many of them via a playlist painstakingly recreated from my old 256MB player. Even worse; to get me from the tram stop to the office, I almost invariably switch to one of two top favorites, to really finish the waking-up process and put me in the right frame of mind for the day ahead. It seems that 16 gigabytes of musical choice is not what is required to get me to work in the morning after all.

No, I am not going to reveal what those two tram-to-office songs are. Oh, okay then: one is a freak Eurovision winner, and the other is about the plight of Cornish miners. And if you can work that out, you are quite possibly my soul mate.