Rage with Accompanying Soundtrack

Normally I listen to music on my morning commute. I’ll go ahead and confess that I’m not a fan of the Shuffle function on my iPod. I often get stuck with a bunch of songs that I don’t listen to, strange interludes, preludes, and spoken word found on musical soundtracks. Or all the instrumental music I own decides to pile on the Shuffle queue and bore me to death on the way to work. But I’ve been thinking about the Shuffle for a while, due to my fabulous luck of finding this guy’s blog. Read it; it’s good. Anyhow, Shuffle has been on my mind, so I decided last week to test it out. Monday: eh. Tuesday: eh. Wednesday: Really? Thursday: Why am I torturing myself with this? And then, Friday happened, people.

So, Friday morning I’m suppressing my rage because there is always a reason to be full of it on the Seoul Metro. And I’m finding it easy to not think about how angry I am because I can’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s like my iPod has finally become my best friend. All week, Shuffle has been disappointing me. But for some reason, I swear my iPod has finally figured me out and is using its Shuffle feature to woo me. You’re not going to believe this list. But here it is anyway.

Say It To Me Now- Glen Hansard (Once)
Drive In, Drive Out- Dave Matthews Band (Crash)
Come Together- Aerosmith (Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits)
Things We Said Today- The Beatles (Hard Day’s Night)
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again- Bob Dylan (Blonde on Blonde)
Brainwashed- George Harrison (Brainwashed)
If You Belonged to Me- Traveling Wilburys (The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. I)
Memories- Elvis Presley (2nd to None)
Black Star- Radiohead (The Bends)
Not Yet Dark- Bob Dylan (The Essential Bob Dylan)

No lie.

So, as I pushed the lock button on the top of my beautiful black square of music, the song Say It To Me Now began playing. This is from the soundtrack to the movie Once, which won an Oscar this year for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures and it won Best Original Song for the first track on the album, Falling Slowly. Once is a superb film in my intelligent and infallible cinematic opinion, and if you haven’t seen it, you should see it. Say It To Me Now’s 2:37 got me down the elevator and all the way to the escalator going down into the pit of hell, also known as the subway.

DMB was a nice treat. Dave always takes me back to being 17 and my first real concert. I saw them the summer of 2000 with Gaelen, a boyfriend who shaped my musical taste my junior and senior years of high school. Dang, he deserves a lot of credit for my intelligent and infallible musical opinions… And then I was surprised. I couldn’t be mad at the lady who whacked me with her purse trying to get off the train for all the wonder and surprise of Aerosmith’s cover of Come Together, which I didn’t even know I owned. What the crap? I know, right? Danielle didn’t know she owned a Beatles cover? Ah, well, I didn’t. I snatched the Greatest Hits album off my friend, Evan, in 2006 before I left for the U.K. All morality issues aside, I didn’t realize this song was on there and I couldn’t place it, so had to look at the iPod to check and see who it was. Hey, it’s always a good day when you find you have Beatles covers you didn’t know you had. So, I was gracious and didn’t yank that woman’s fat purse out of her hands and beat her with it. I just rubbed my arm where she whacked me and thought about how empty her life was without the Beatles and the bands that decide to play their stuff.

Which was weird, because then the Shuffle threw the Beatles right on into the mix. What are the odds? (I know there is probably some way to actually calculate these odds taking into account the total number of songs on my iPod and the ridiculous number of Beatles songs I have. But that would involve math. And Danielle Math is never correct and can sometimes be harmful to your health.) Things We Said Today is from the film and album A Hard Day’s Night. The film is awesome. See it now. This song was followed directly by another Beatles song- Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. First, my mouth dropped open a bit and then I began to laugh with disbelief, which made all the Koreans who weren’t already staring at me do so. My friend Tariq had just recently told me that he thought Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was entirely overrated. I listened with his statements in mind, but couldn’t get over the fact that the God of all Things Musical was living and breathing through my iPod, orchestrating the perfect morning playlist. So, the song may be overrated, but it was lost on me as I was so awed and thrilled that I had now heard 3 Beatles songs (albeit one a cover) in a row and the choice was anything but mine.

Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again got me through the transfer at Jamsil from Line 8 to Line 2. My favorite line is “Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.” Dylan helped me throw off the annoyance of an older man stepping on the back of my foot and causing my shoe to fall off. A shoe falling off is no big deal except that I was in the middle of a mass of people moving in one direction and when you stop, you shall be trampled. I felt a bit like Mufasa in The Lion King with the wildebeests. Or, I felt like I was stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again. Both are apt. Then I wondered as I waited on the next train if it was possible that everyone in this country had been brainwashed in their underground behavior. And Georgey boy helped me out with his solo work, Brainwashed.

So far: soundtrack, Beatles cover (for a soundtrack, actually- Sgt. Pepper’s…), actual Beatles double-time, Dylan, George Harrison AND THEN THE TRAVELING WILBURYS, which included Dylan and Harrison (along with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Oribison). I know. It’s unbelievable. The rest of my journey was filled with Elvis and Radiohead, who aren’t related, but I realize the Shuffle is only capable of so much. It is, after all, a machine. The Radiohead song was from my favorite album so far, including their latest In Rainbows, which is great but just can’t top The Bends for me. Another Dylan song brought me full circle in the music world and escorted me off the elevator to work. I took my shoes off, put them on the shelf, walked straight to my desk and wrote down this playlist. Even as I write this, I’m still amazed. Aren’t you?

To sum up: I heart Shuffle. Who knew?