I was driving down the interstate this weekend when “Sweet Home Alabama” started playing on the radio. I always stop my channel tuning and listen to this Lynard Skynard song when it’s on, just like I always stop to watch “The Shawshank Redemption” when it’s on TNT. However, there is one stanza that I didn’t understand the first few years after I’d first heard it:

Well I heard mister Young sing about her

Well, I heard ole Neil put her down

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember

A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow

I don’t always pay attention to song lyrics. It can take me 4 or 5 listens before I start to decode what a song is really about. It was only when I took a History of Rock n’ Roll class that I heard the Neil Young song, “Southern Man,” which is critical of the south and is what Lynard Skynard is referring to.

As I continued driving along, I tried to think of more songs that make reference to other songs. It sounds like [...]

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I have listened to “Read My Mind” by The Killers 87 times. I have no excuse for this. It’s a good pop song, but 87 times? 87 times?! It’s a four-minutes long, which means I’ve spent almost 6 hours of my life listening to this song. The number is probably even higher because it doesn’t count all the times I listened to that track in my car.

The Last.fm plug-in I have installed in WinAmp and iTunes counts every MP3 I play on my computer and calculates these embarrassing statistics for me. It almost seems like an invasion of privacy putting my actual musical preferences out there, instead of just what I tell people I like. It’s like the difference between all the healthy stuff in your food diary and the Oreos you’re actually stuffing in your mouth and “forgetting” to write down. We tend to judge people by what they do and don’t like. Whenever I have friends or family over for the first time, they go right for my bookcase, trying to glean insight [...]

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