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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?