Embarrassing Secret Weapons of Musical Motivation
9 Comments Published by Joel January 3rd, 2007 in DIY. Share This
Every so often I’ll sit down for an hour or two of OCD-inspired MP3 library cleaning, attempting to purge the duplicate albums while retaining the proper directory structures from my many “Best of…” downloads. (Media Monkey has a been a useful ally, although it’s far from perfect for my needs.)
I would like at some point to start adding a bit of metadata to my songs to indicate that they are good music for getting motivated, either for workouts or for plain ol’ working. In the meantime, I have a few albums that I consider secret weapons, capable of drop-kicking me out of a funk and into at least an hour of full-on productivity.
Two (extremely white) secrets: Def Leppard’s Hysteria and ELO’s Out of the Blue. Horrible, I know, but I dare you to listen to either album without finding yourself chugging along in a fit of Teutonic/Protestant work ethic.
Of course, if I had to pick just one song to lift my spirits, guaranteed, it would be this: Hall and Oates’ (You Make My) Dreams Come True. Blast it in the office this morning. Not only will your business metric of choice increase by 5%, all the ladies will be intrigued by your resolute sexual self-image.
Do you have any single albums or songs that get your brain’s booty bouncing?
See also: Workout Music [AlexKing.org]
Speaking of adding metadata to an mp3 library — here’s what I’ve been doing for some time now: (I am an iTunes user)…
1) Go to allMusic.com and copy/paste the “Themes” data into the Comments field of the id3 tag, or whatever kind of tag it is these days — This is great for smart Playlists eg. Comment Contains Day Driving.
2) Use my own tags for the grouping sections, good for more smart playlists — [study], [chill], [party]…
3) Not exactly metadata, but another trick I use is to use the BPM field of the tag (Which normally goes unused for me) to hold the star rating — songs that I tag 1 star get “1″ in the BPM field, etc… This makes my MP3’s a little more portable.
What a dork, eh?
Like most decisions in life, I prefer to have my computer make them for me if at all possible. Along these lines I’ve always been intrigued by Moodlogic (http://www.moodlogic.com/). The gist of it is you can say, “Moodlogic! Go make me a motivational playlist from my music library!” and it does your bidding. I can’t really testify as to how well it works since my primary music library is on my Mac, but it does seem to have a fairly substantial user community.
Motivational/Productive:
Katrina & The Waves – Walking On Sunshine
They Might Be Giants – The Guitar
Led Zeppelin – Bring it on home
Max Sedgley – Devil Inside
Lenny Kravitz – Are You Gonna Go My Way
Booty Shakers:
Deep Dish vs. Dire Straits – Flashing for Money (Sultan Club Mix)
Dee-Lite – Groove is in the Heart
James Brown – Super Bad
Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer
If I’m doing a workout, I usually stitch a continuous mix of some hard house or trance together a couple days before, and then let it sit on my desk without listening to it. That way the songs feel new again but are familiar enough to keep my mood up.
Seriously, I am never coming to this website again. geez.
I swear by Pat Benatar. Swear by her. I’m posting this here not because I’m embarassed, but because you all should be for not having piped up about her yet. Christ almighty, there are modern singers out there who have worthy pipes, but why doesn’t anyone write music like Neil Giraldo anymore?
I love Pat. Seen her play many times, and as recently as a year or so ago she can still hit all the notes with vigor and aplomb. And for a fairly flat-chested mother in her fifties, she’s still a hot rock chick with plenty of fire. I like the latter day work, but her first two albums are pure, uncut dope.
Pay special attention to the sleeper hit, “My Clone Sleeps Alone“, off of In The Heat Of The Night. I defy anyone worth their salt to not bop along after the drums kick in.
if on my bke on a warm day, i could listen to broken social scene’s “bandwitch” and most of massive attack over and over, and the miles just melt away.
if on a treadmill in the winter, i need all the help i can get. foo fighters duran duran and phil collins. fuck shame, those three are rocket fuel. ’specially ole phil. wicked drums for a bald white man.
oh, and @guy – after one quick look at your site, i suspect we’ll not miss your company.
I’m one of those people who have to work to instrumentals. Vocals just distract me. I was building up an ok collection of electronica (sorry for the blanket term, I’ve grown very tired of the obnoxious list of electronica variants: house, big beat, etc., etc).
Having kids froze my music collection at about the turn of the millenium, but here are my old standbys for “focus music” (which I should be listening to now, frankly, and not be touring around here):
The Crystal Method: Vegas (you’ve heard these themes in dozens of movies and commercials)
da damn phreak noize phunk: electric crate digger (this is a funky variant of the more pure techno Hardfloor)
And, although there are some vocals thrown in, you might like anything Moby, Chemical Brothers, the Buddha Bar collection, the Nightmare’s on Wax collection, Oakenfold (if you’re into DJ), Propellerheads, St Germain (jazzier), Dmitri from Paris, Antibalas, Massive Attack and Fat Boy Slim.
“Wake up, Boo” By the Boo Radley’s. If I was stuck in some sort of Ground Hog day-esque nightmare where I lived every day over and over again, waking up to this song would make it at least 80% less likely I’d kill myself that day.
No matter how much flak you will take for playing any other Hall and Oates song ever recorded, You Make My Dreams is simply bulletproof. Anyone who claims not to like it is flat-out lying. Timeless whitebread head-bobbing always ensues.
My personal motivational mastersong that I turn to when I start to lose steam on the elliptical machine: Get Up Offa That Thing by professor James Brown, who taught us that what goes up must get down. Four minutes of effortless, um, effort every time I hear it. Rearviewmirror by Pearl Jam is close, but too dark for some moods.