Finding Music in Unusual Places

I'm not quite sure when it happened, but I stopped listening to the radio.

It probably happened when I stopped driving every day, which was really the only time I listened. But I distinctly remember a day of running errands when I noticed the same song playing when I went into the store as when I came back out. I love music, but it became obvious that radio stations were playing the same songs over and over.

My partner and I recently compared what we had on our phones. She’d never heard of most of the songs on mine. How was I choosing what to buy with my iTunes gift cards?

I hadn’t been paying attention. After looking at my list and giving it some thought, it became obvious: I bought music I heard in TV shows, commercials, and movies. It isn’t always easy to figure out the names of those songs or the artist, especially since only small segments of the song are usually played. The internet to the rescue!

Thanks to google and YouTube, nearly every song can be found eventually, but there is a bit of trial and error. Sometimes I find the song by looking at the music list for an episode of a TV show or googling a specific commercial. As long as I know the year the commercial aired, this works pretty well.

When I have only a line or two from the song, I have to listen to snippet after snippet on iTunes to find the one I want. I’ll give you an example. I heard a bit of a song on a video in YouTube. The only word I could remember when it came time to search for the song was “pray”.  iTunes has pages of artists who have recorded songs called Pray--and I wasn’t even sure this was the main word!   So, trial and error began as I listened to snippets of every song. I finally found it on a soundtrack from a movie I never saw. Sadly, this doesn’t work if the snippet is not the same as the one I heard and liked.

Another problem is it’s not always clear which versions of a song I want. For instance, do I want Toxic by Brittany Spears or the cast of Glee? I sometimes make mistakes.  It turns out I wanted the Glee version but bought Brittany because Glee didn’t come up on my first search.

Of course, it is also a lovely way to procrastinate. I can justify it as work related:  “It will go on my book’s playlist”. 

 Examples from commercials: 

• Under the Milky way by Sia

• Glitter and Gold by Barns Courtney

From TV shows:

• An Honest Man by Fantastic Negrito (Hand of God)

• In the Shadows by Amy Stroup (Lucifer)

• Multiple songs from Shadowhunters, WWE pay per views, Supernatural…

  From Movies:

• Pray from Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack

• Everybody Knows from Suicide squad soundtrack

While I don’t have a lot of Top-10 songs, my phone has a great variety of music I love. What to hear some of them? Check them out on one of my Youtube playlists.

Four Ways Television Sets You Up for Disappointment

Iwill admit that I watch way too much TV and too many movies. We all know that movies and TV shows are not based on reality. They set up the average person for disappointment–and I’m not even talking about the concept that everyone on most shows is young, beautiful, and wealthy.

These are the Top 4 Ways TV programs have set us up:

Burning candles on black background.

1. The speed of travel. A body can be found on the west coast and a D.C. FBI team is on site before the body is even photographed. On a smaller scale, the main character always gets a taxi quickly. Has that been YOUR experience? Not mine. I remember a fated evening in NYC where not one single cab would stop for me.

   Sometimes we have no idea at all how the characters get around. Do shadow hunters always travel with a warlock to portal them, or do they take the subway in their invisible form?

2. Housing is never an issue. Every character has a bedroom that is ridiculously large. Everyone who lives in a city has a penthouse apartment with glass walls and no curtains. Instead, they have beautiful, panoramic views of the city. Many have balconies large enough to accommodate plants, enough furniture for a full room, and maybe a hot tub. Admittedly, the real issue for me is the window walls. One show has wall of windows with a view of a brick wall that appears to be about three feet from the house. Why???

3. Alcoholism is rarely an issue. This despite the fact that, in some shows, all the characters ever drink is alcohol. They rarely show any consequences of all this drinking. Occasionally someone has a cup of coffee or tea but you have to watch closely for those moments to make sure whiskey hasn’t been added.

4. Unrealistic use of candles. What’s most disappointing to me, however, is that my bedroom is not lit with hundreds of pillar candles that seem to burn day and night. How do they afford all those candles? How do they get them lit so quickly? How are they lit when NO ONE was home? Why do none ever sputter and die?

I suppose I could make do with fewer candles if my room was filled with the strands of twinkle lights you see in the bedrooms of TV teenagers. Or I could get one of those glass-walled apartment and let the city lights illuminate my boudoir. 

It’s something to consider.