Soundtracks

On July 18 2006 · 2 Comments · In Diary

A nerdy confession this may be, but I think a lot of people do it.

Sat on the train this morning, the commuters stood with hangdog expressions, maybe dreading the inevitable crush to get on the tube at Victoria. No-one was talking and everyone looked sort of lonely, or at least in their own world. How appropriate then that Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love’ came up on my MP3 player – all of a sudden a mundane train journey became a tragi-comic music video, and the expression in the face of the girl sat across from me became yearning, not gormlessness.

Crawling up a hill in Peru at three thousand meters, I was beginning to flag quite seriously, my pace slowing, my knees sore. Santana’s ‘Migra’ came on, and I practically sprinted the rest of the way, the tribal drums and chanting lyrics propelling me along as if I had all the wind in the valley blowing right up behind me.

Driving through deep troughs of sand on Fraser Island, winding through the inland forest, without much of an idea where we were going, Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’ came on, again randomly, and a slightly bewildering meander became a devil-may-care adventure into the unknown.

Music’s good like that. I can see why commuters always have headphones on – a good song can put a gloss over the mundane. When the crescendo of a song breaking out coincides perfectly with the sun hitting your face as you walk off the train, it allows you to feel, just for a moment, that you could be in a film of your life.


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  • nick

    ahhh how romantic, personally I always enjoyed the sunrise across Battersea power station as the train looped over the Thames into Victoria station……doughboy’s snap back to reality.  Headphones are a necessity to drown out the stress that is noise pollution and take control of your own aural domain.  There is nothing more stressful than being forced to listen to other people’s inane chit chat and mobile phone ring tones.  Further to this, albeit a classic one upmanship scenario, you need headphones to drown out fellow commuters annoying music with your own annoying music.   Personally I recommend Sennheiser PX100 noise blocking folding headphones. 

  • Iain

    It’s great how the soundtrack machine we all carry with us now can sometimes get it right. Sadly not for me at the minute though – my second I-river has died, don’t think I’ll buy another one – their support is just garbage – you email them and basically you don’t get a reply (still waiting for responses from my emails of about 1 year ago after my first machine copped it).  Ideally what I want is to get all my data off my old one, in reality, when I eventually find my receipt I’ll end up in PC world (my mistake the first time) and get something different this time.Once again, I haven’t backed up everything on it.  Sometimes I really can be a dim little sockmonkey…I’m really hacked off because I loved the functionality – especially the line in function.  Any recommendation on a new piece of gear?