Convey Your Musical Taste To Us

A friend asked people on FB to introduce her to new music. I got carried away and wound up with give-or-take 100 of my favorite songs from my favorite artists of all time. They were all massively influential to me at various times, even if I don’t necessarily jam to them all anymore (okay that’s a complete and total lie I unashamedly jam to all of this on the regular).

Sure, about 60% of my list could be credibly labeled metal or hard rock, but I like to think there’s plenty of variety on there, even though a few un-Spotifyable things are missing (e.g., Yellowcard’s “Avondale,” which sums up my flirtation with emo punk perfectly, and the thoroughly excellent “Attack!!!” from Jeremy Soule’s sublime Total Annihilation soundtrack). Honestly, I’m pretty proud of it and spent more time than is probably reasonable trying to distill my favorite artists and albums down to their more quintessential or perfectly introductory moments (though again, Spotify’s haphazard availability prevented tracks like Blind Guardian’s absolutely “Nightfall” from showing up in lieu of more available, still wonderful but undeniably lesser songs).

Do any of you have a similar product, or would you be interested in creating and sharing one?

Man I don’t have Spotify, but if I remember I could whip up a YouTube list.

It will be very metal. But also some prog rock, or jazz type stuff.

But mostly flavors of metal.

Strictly speaking I don’t really use Spotify, but it seemed to be the most generally preferred means of transferring music to The Millennials. For my own use, it’s all Play Music all the time :)

I listen to very little new music. I will occasionally hear something somewhere and end up buying a CD. I listen to most of my music in my truck via CD. Sharing a home with people who don’t care for loud classic rock (with the occasional new stuff) I have few options there to listen to music.

I hope soon to get a new truck, with modern audio connections and at that time plan on “modernizing” my music listening habits.

Since I don’t have a Spotify, and can’t actually properly investigate, do you have any repeat artists, or is it one song per band you did?

Because ain’t no way I make a list of 100 songs without at least 4-5 each of Dream Theater, Redemption, and Devin Townsend. Just saying ;)

This is a great idea. Lots of stuff on there that would probably cross over with mine, and I’ll have to make a point to check out the ones I don’t know. I’ll try to put together a similar list, though I also don’t use Spotify.

I went with 1 apiece. Because I am bad at starting threads, I provide no real guidelines for how you guys should follow suit.

The playlist I put together was intended originally to introduce someone to my favorite artists, albums, and/or genres with songs custom-designed to present them in the best light possible. That often means my favorite song from those artists, but sometimes it was something lower-ranked that I thought would be better as a “first listen.”

I unswervingly stuck with CDs for a very long time and still break them out on occasional. Dat sound quality, though!

You are talking to someone who bought a new turntable a few years ago so he went have to throw out all his old records. :)

I even have a few dozen self recorded cassette tapes.

I still insist on buying everything on CD. I rip them in high quality to my phone and mostly play from there, but every now and again I break out the disk.

Mostly I still love to get the album covers and liner notes. It just… adds to the experience.

So Armando, is the Devin Townsend song you picked Stormbending? Because while not my favorite DT song, it is undoubtedly the one I’d tab to introduce someone.

My gf’s the hardcore record collector of the household, but I’ll grab things that I genuinely want the “imperfections” of vinyl on. Things specifically mixed (originally) or remastered (new stuff) to be vinyl-appropriate, ideally. I find that black metal works very well on the medium, for instance.


Yeahhhhh. . . I barely know any lyrics to songs I’ve come across/started listening to in the last 4-5 years (my timeline for going almost fully digital) because I don’t spend hours poring over the liner notes anymore :(


Indeed it is! “Offer Your Light” would have been my second choice for that purpose. “Secret Science” or “Kingdom” would probably be my favorite track. Maybe “Save Our Now” some days.

Because of my listening in my truck thru a 6-disk CD changer I rarely know the name of any song, unless it’s a main lyric in the song.

Question: If I were to buy one Arcade Fire CD, which one should I buy?

I’m most familiar with the Suburbs and think it’s excellent, though that’s definitely favorite album territory, not favorite band. My affair with them peaked during the tour for that record, which I listened to nonstop for days before seeing them in a giant outdoors amphitheater with my gf. It felt pretty profound at the time, but maybe I was just caught up in the moment :-)

this is a summer playlist i made a few years ago for sitting in the yard drinking beers til it got too cold (this is the english summer, it gets cold around 9.30 even at the height of june but the beer jacket mean you can keep going for a bit longer). it represents my tastes pretty reasonably these days although my record collection is full of 90s indie / emo / hardcore / punk blah blah blah.

Oh this is exciting! Aside from Djr, Dan Deacon, and a couple of rappers, I don’t recognize ANYTHING in that list! New music!!

For the most part my musical tastes lean toward aging Gen Xer, if you went through my MP3 player (and yes, I still use one) you’d see the complete libraries of The Pixies, The Clash, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., all that nonsense. What with having a family and all, I don’t get out to see new bands really, so my exposure to new bands is mostly listening to KEXP during commutes.

The most recent bands I’ve really dug are Best Coast and an all-female surf rock band called La Luz. They were local to Seattle but relocated to L.A. when they started getting a little big - it ain’t the 90s anymore, kids, not unless your name’s Macklemore.

Alright, here’s mine. I made it by looking through my thumbs-ups on Play Music, so it’s probably missing some of the stuff I was into before the rise of streaming, and I’m too lazy to go recreate it on spotify.

https://play.google.com/music/preview/pl/AMaBXymeVioQVW-ecwOCbHgFbYR07O5OHLzvIgibaGuwDQ7rG5rROFKj4M2T2Vp1lLqyYiX95s44esTLkbFm37Q5caZTbKw1oA==

Also I stopped at 109 songs, matching Armando, but some of them were added to my library through manual uploads and don’t show up here. For the record, they are: kLuTz - 600 AD in Piano; Duke of Pianeet - Suite Xenogears; Bob Seger - Turn the Page; Undrask - Battle Through Time; Beyond the Black - Lost in Forever; Blind Guardian - Nightfall; Iron Maiden - Run to the Hills; Sabaton - Carolus Rex (Swedish Version); Yuzo Koshiro - Battle - Initial Strike; Queen - Killer Queen; Gorement - SIlent Hymn; Black Mages - Clash on the Big Bridge.

I have always preferred listening to an entire album if I can. Granted not everything may work but I think you get the best idea of what the band can do. If all you hear is a bands best stuff you really haven’t heard the whole band. If that makes sense.

My musical tastes are…odd. There was a time when, if you were to open the cd changer in my car (remember those things?), you’d be pretty much guaranteed to find four things: King Crimson, Oingo Boingo, Weird Al, a Yoko Kanno soundtrack of some sort.

These both make my list, although I went with the English version :-D

I wanna ride with you!!