What Music Means To Me

Bob Dylan – Blowin’ In The Wind (Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan)

I don’t really remember too much of what I was listening too before the age of 10 because as well as popular music my Dad would often play obscure albums or soundtracks and I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between a lot of things. However a number of songs do stand out in my mind as being played regularly and a lot of them have stayed with me up to today and are on my iPod, which I take with me most places. Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash are two artists whom I would consider particularly influential. ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ by Bob Dylan and ‘Jackson’ by Johnny Cash have always been some of my favourite songs and I can listen to these songs as well as many others that they’ve made at any time. I do feel I have to say though that I struggle to find the same connections to many Bob Dylan songs from any album he released after 1976 as I feel he became more corporate and his music suffered as a result of that. This would also have been around the time that he started his ‘NeverEnding tour’ and playing primarily for others instead of himself as he did early in his career.

Owl City – Fuzzy Blue Lights (Of June)

Before 2005 the only music I really listened to was what my dad would play from his CD collection so on my 11^th birthday, just before I went to secondary school I got my first laptop and started to amass my own music collection. I remember finding owl city when I was searching for new music on MySpace. Adam Young, the man behind the moniker ‘Owl City’ has just put out a free EP called ‘Of June’ and it was one of the first Eps to go into my iTunes playlist. Owl City, from then on has become a staple in any iTunes library I make which is saying something as I often delete my entire music collection and start from scratch in order to find new music and keep things fresh.

Girl Talk – Down For The Count (All Day)

Although the most recent album of four was released in 2010 with the first being released eight years prior in 2002, I only discovered Girl Talk at the end of 2011. The song ‘Down For The Count’ was the first of his songs that I heard and I think that’s why it stands out to me more than some of his others. The way he produces songs is to sample pieces of music from various other artists and to mix them together into something completely new. In his new album ‘All Day’ for example, he sampled over 500 pieces of music from more than 60 different artists spanning a whole variety of genres and decades.