In a Music Mood

A couple of months ago, my computer hard drive died. I lost a lot of work and play on that HD. I have an external hard drive that I use as a back up, but I never set it up to back things up automatically.

When I bought the HD about a year ago, I thought it might be best to just do all my back ups manually, so that I’d be forced to take a look at what all was on my hard drive each time. I didn’t want it to just get cluttered with a bunch of junk, and I thought that if I forced myself to pay attention each week, I’d maintain a neat and tidy machine. Well, I did the manual back ups each week for several weeks. Then I started bothering with it every other week. Then each month. Then a couple of months would pass between back ups.

Bad, bad process, that. After learning my lesson with the HD crash, I went on and set up my back up routine to run automatically each week. I’d rather have a backed up HD than a clean one. Fortunately I only lost about four weeks worth of work and play. But something I never bothered backing up was my iTunes music. So I had to re-copy all my CDs onto my new hard drive, (and then to the back up). In doing this, I got to refamiliarize myself with my music collection.

I really like music from the 1970s. Probably 70% of my collection consists of 70s easy listening, rock, and funk/soul. (Of the remaining percentage, 25% is from the 80s, 5% from 90s and 00s.)

iTunes says I have a total of 958 songs. But as I go through the list, reorganizing it all into play lists, I’m surprised to find I still have pretty big gaps in my genres; I’m missing many songs that I really like. So I perused the iTunes store to find those songs and fill in some of those gaps. I still have a little ways to go to get everything I want. But I’m getting there.

My boys have asked me to make them a CD for listening to when we’re all riding in my truck. These are their selections:

• We Will Rock You – Queen
• Hungry Like the Wolf – Duran Duran
• Crazy on You – Heart
• Bicycle – Queen
• Magic Man – Heart
• Baracuda – Heart
• Star Wars theme – John Williams
• Imperial March – John Williams
• Back in Black – AC/DC
• A Horse with no Name – America

It’s kind of funny, when I think about it. I have strong nostalgic love for the music I heard when I was my boys’ ages, in the 70s. That’s the music I grew up hearing on the radio, and on records and 8-track cassettes — contemporary for the time. But my boys are not hearing the music contemporary with this time in their lives. They’re growing up on the music of 30 years before they were born.

I sometimes wonder how well they’ll fit in with their peers when they’re teenagers. Will they, at some point soon, start hearing and liking today’s music? Or will they continue to prefer music from the previous century?

Bullgrit