Music. Where to start? My musical tastes are perhaps a little eclectic. Or if you prefer to be less polite, it might be more appropriate to describe them as wildly inconsistent and all over the place.
To illustrate this point, here's what was in my CD player tonight: Depeche Mode's Black Celebration, a Berlin Gala recording of various bits of opera from Mozart, Bizet, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky, and the Beatles' Abbey Road. That's not so representative of my music collection, but it's not a bad start.
To put it simply, I love music. There's not much stuff I don't like, and most of that falls into a couple of categories: bad rap, yodelling, horrible warbling (Mariah Carey being an excellent example of this style), and really really bad death/thrash metal.
My little collection includes opera, classical, better examples of 80s pop (primarily the darker stuff like Depeche Mode, The Church, and The Smiths), country (particularly Lyle Lovett -- but more on him later), jazz (of varying styles), blues, some of what used to be "alternative" music (artists such as Tori Amos), a little Latin, and even some techno.
Now I'm going to write a little about Lyle Lovett. This guy is just fabulous. I first heard him on the radio while sitting in a car waiting for someone else: Skinny Legs was playing, and I kind of liked it.
Then a few days later I accidentally caught part of The Late Show, on which he was performing Penguins. At this point it became clear that I needed to go and snarf myself a copy of the relevant album, I Love Everybody.
This was a good move. I'd thought I'd heard albums which I liked a lot before, but I Love Everybody really resonated with me. The primary theme is the singer's bad luck with women, but it's not depressing, and it's not self-pitying. The man doesn't take himself so seriously that he can't laugh at himself, and he does that quite a bit on this album.
It does prove one other thing, too: Julia Roberts is not a very good singer. This album was recorded while they were married, and they sing a duet on the final track (also called I Love Everybody).
I left it at this one album for quite a while. Then, on one of my periodic CD purchasing binges, I grabbed copies of Live in Texas and The Road to Ensenada. The latter is a truly beautiful album, ranging from the self-mocking Her First Mistake ("She made me think so fast I left my thoughts behind") to the fun and bouncy Long Tall Texan, to serious stuff such as the namesake, The Road to Ensenada. The former is also extremely cool.
Aargh. I am so tempted to try and write a Lyle Lovett geek filk. Hm. You can have my girl, but don't you touch my VAX?