Follow and listen along to the songs that distracted me from conversations with annoyed friends in my new Spotify playlist (more info below).
I love Shazam. It’s probably the only smartphone app that I felt was missing from my life before it was invented. It’s such a genius thing: you’re in a bar or a club or a café, and the track that’s playing there right now is amazing and you need to know what it is or it will be lost forever. Point your phone at it, and BAM: it’s ID’d.
These are all my Shazam tags ever, going back to Feb 2010.
I don’t remember the context of most of them – though I know they weren’t all “This track is awesome! I must know what it is” moments. Sometimes it’s to settle an argument, or to name a nemesis track (you know: that song you dislike that seems to follow you wherever you go). Sometimes it’s a track that’s haunted me for years, but I could never put a name to until Shazam empowered me to be all like, “Aha!” Point. BAM. “FINALLY.” Occasionally, it’s a track that, in that moment, sounded amazing, but when later revisited seems… underwhelming. And some of them are just plain “Wha…?”.
I kind of like it how the tracks are just there, with no explanation or annotation to tie them together. And even though I was there for each moment, I’m still left guessing what it might have been about each song that grabbed me in each of those moments, enough to pick up my phone to capture its soundtrack…
It’s funny: of the relatively few tracks I Shazam’d that I’d end up adding to my collection, I’d discover I already had many of them – which goes to show just how spoiled for music one can be that they don’t even have time to properly listen to everything in their collection.
Playlist still being updated (there’s a bunch to trawl through) – if yr on Spotify, click here to follow.
More listening: you can also follow my Hip Hop Faves Playlist on Spotify.