Musical Preferences

I love learning about others' musical preferences. It fascinates me what folks like and why. The extramusical associations are wonderful and enrich my own experience of musical selections. I often ask why someone likes a song, and there is always a story.

Personally, I am a lyric-centric person. The musical structure grabs my attention, but the lyrics are what pull me in. For me, the poetry of the song is just as important as the music. I do love music without lyrics as well, but songs are my favorite.

I thrill to the Beach Boys because they sing about familiar places - all of the beaches that I spent time on during my youth. I love Chicago's eighties music because the words illustrated many situations in my life. I thrill to Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals - all of them - for those moments of emotion that suck me in and keep me there. I can only listen to or watch The Phantom of the Opera every so often since I end up in thrall around The Point of No Return everytime. It is embarrassing.

I spent the summer of '06 obsessed with the musical, Wicked. It still has the power to overtake my system whenever I listen to it, but I lived with the music during that summer. I would wake up singing songs from the musical and not get them out of my mind. I probably also dreamed about the music. I have learned that that much obsession is not good for my sanity, so I avoid listening to the entire musical. I find that I can listen to one song, but not two!

The best thing that has ever happened to me and my preference development is technology. The ability to burn one preferred song onto a CD for my own listening pleasure has assisted me in maintaining my eclectic (and it really is) taste in music. My friends often criticize my CD formats - I'll go from a song from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang to an angry girl rocker singing about being dumped. I like them. I really enjoy that variety and am interested in the abrupt changes. The music is my favorite, and sharing the music with friends is something that I choose to do rather than have to do.

Gotta go listen to some good music, now.

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