The Soundtrack Of Your Life

It seems as though I always land on this topic; however, there is a good reason for it this time: someone very dear to me raised a question about music and its influence over a decisions one makes, "Could the sound of that music possibly change your decision or merely reinforce?" (http://www.mindracewithin.blogspot.com/)

And, well, that's what I aim to investigate, briefly, before I indulge in the Top Ten Soundtrack of my life, which, make no mistake about it, will not be easy, as there are literally thousands of songs and tracks to choose from. And, after the last post, I really needed something light to write about.

The question is meaningful, and though the originator of the question chooses not to answer it, I believe they (yes, I'm using an anonymous pronoun as to not genderize and sway opinion of the person who asked the question) knew the answer to this question, at least what was true to their mind, but passed it off as digression. With that said, here's my two cents: the mind is more mysterious and cunning than we give it credit for. I know we like to believe we control ourselves and our mind, and, for the majority of the time, we do. We tell our mind to make us stand up, to shoot electrical currents through our bodies; the nervous system reacts, and our bodies move. We tell ourselves to eat, or not eat, to move our optical nerves across a screen and interpret strange sticks of curvature and straightness into words into meaning. These measures we can control, of course, this all depends on socialization as well, which I cannot go into here because it shifts the discussion to a socio-political arena, and I promised myself it wouldn't happen today.

The measures we cannot control are fairly obvious: sleep/dreams and the subconscious. I include this in the answering of the question because I believe this is where the origination of conscious acts arrive from, the subconscious. What this means: your actions are all premeditated on some level; you were going to act in a certain fashion before you actually acted, and your actions throughout the course of the day led you to arrive each premeditated action. So, the music you chose when you were feeling a certain way, merely reinforces the feeling you had chosen before you even knew you chose it. Does this make sense? Argue if you like, but you know I'm right.

Now, down to the nitty-gritty, the Top Ten Soundtrack of my life: (in no particular order, just as they came into my head, after premeditated deliberation)

1. The Talking Heads: Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place)
2. Bob Dylan/Grateful Dead (Fall Out From the Phil Zone): Visions of Johanna
3. Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues/Leopard-Skin-Pill Box-Hat/A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall
4. Eric Clapton: Wonderful Tonight and Lay Down Sally (All from the Slow Hand Album so it counts)
5. Bob Marley: War/Jammin'
6. Phish: Maze/Reba/Simple/Mike's Song/Strange Design (pick any live version you want: dynamite)
7. Miles Davis: So What
8. John Coltrane: A Few Of My Favorite Things
9. Grateful Dead: DarkStar/The Other One/It Must Have Been the Roses/Black-Throated Wind/Cosmic Charlie/Throwin' Stones/Unbroken Chain (too many more to continue)
10. Dave Matthews: #41/Minarets/Crush/Lover Lay Down

I realize this is cheating, but for a music lover, it's impossible to choose just ten songs. I chose ten artists, which I thought was more than fair.