When you think about it, isn't all music "Music to your Ears"?

Musical taste is one of those things people often ask me about that I find difficult to go into detail on. I like a wide spread of music - when I studied I used to listen to Classical stuff because the BBC and such said it increased your brain power. I didn't hate it either, though these days I don't make a habit of classical listening. I like the reasonably mechanical pop music that comes out these days - something about it makes me feel down-to-earth and normal, considering my technically-intensive hobbies put me at odds with the people I meet. That means listening to Kiss FM, which admittedly was a big part of my time when I was doing driving lessons and right before I failed my driving test for the first time. At the time of writing I have another one in May, so we'll see if David in about six weeks is in a good mood or not.

I have a mix for the crap pop music stuff called my "guilt mix", as it'd garner something like a cringe from most of the people I work with. But I don't only like the pop stuff, and there's very few artists I can say I like all of their work. I tend to latch on to a few songs from a band, meaning even though I don't love Justin Bieber, his collab with Shawn Mendes on Monster found its way into that guilt mix. Oops.

Then there's the other playlists on YouTube that are a little more spread out - one just called Musik has everything from relatively high-intensity EDM to a chill, tropical remix of Toto's Africa. There's a "chill rock" playlist I maintain along with a few friends, one of whom is about ten years older than me, with such songs as Stairway to Heaven, Nothing Else Matters, and Epitaph in it. Epitaph is one I wish I could get away with removing without causing a fuss because it triggered an existential crisis in me the more I listened to it. There's also the fabled "classics" mix, which is beginning to gather dust - about ten people on one of my teams contributed to that, featuring so-called "classic nostalgic songs" all the way from the 60s to the present day. As such, the taste - and to what extent you can stand the current song - varies wildly. When it became apparent every other song was triggering euphoria in one person and cringe in another, that mix stopped going around the group so much.

I have a curated and generally liked playlist of synthwave remixes - that is, remixes of songs to sound like the 80s (or more 80s, in the case they're from that period), with synths, kick drums, and deterioration. It's less how the 80s sounded, more the 80s as you remember them. I've got remixes that even my mum loves, like a really intense mix of Another Brick In The Wall. I can safely put this one on in the group chat without suffering a wave of sighs, and it's pretty good for active work.

Then there's a couple of mixes that basically only exist for my girlfriend's benefit - Chillwave Mix, Best of the Midnight, and the one named after her, Eleanor. She likes me to sing to her but she also equally likes cuddling up to music that reminds her of me, so the Chillwave stuff - essentially 'space music' -usually goes on when a cuddle is intended, and the Eleanor playlist goes on when she's looking to hear me sing at her for a bit. I'm getting pretty good at some of those songs now, though I can never replicate it unless I'm singing it to her, lying down.

Best of the Midnight is focused around a particular 80s themed band called, er, The Midnight, who use a lot of saxophone in their pieces. I've never heard a song of theirs I don't like, but unfortunately the memory of that band is tainted, a little bit, by an unpleasant ex who I was with when I first heard The Midnight. Some of their songs became "our" songs and those are, as a result, difficult listening. These days I try to reprogram memories like this around different contexts - playing them when I'm with my girlfriend, or doing something else like playing a favourite game. It doesn't always work, but it at least dulls the unpleasant edge to some of these.

The running theme here is I have no real definition of what my musical taste is; I generally like 80s style stuff, I suppose, but Synthwave, Chillwave, and Outrun are all styles that emulate the 80s style but don't copy it. I don't like many true 80s songs as a result - the stereotypical stuff like Crockett's Theme is the only stuff I have on some of these playlists by choice.

Hell of a thing, music. Wonder why cavemen invented it. Or how?