Just a little glimpse of a story I'll tell

The anally retentive nerd in me is happy.

Very happy.

It’s been a month or so since the launch of the new LastFM and I love it. With a new look and new tricks up it's sleeve, never has being a list obsessed geek muso been so much fun. It now updates every bit of data instantly and allows you to look at your listening habits in pretty much any way, shape or form you desire. Along with Facebook, Drowned In Sound and various mp3blogs, LastFM is one of my most visited websites. The only problem with it, is that sometimes, I find myself obsessing over my charts. I find myself wondering why so-and-so band are so high up and why such-and-such band are so low down in the ratings. I knew something was wrong when I found my listening habits being influenced by how it would reflect in my charts. While I never edited or deleted tracks, I definitely found myself deliberately ignoring songs or artists because I didn't want them to show up in my charts. Sad I know, but hey, I never claimed to be anything but. Thankfully I'm past that now. Besides, I've never really held much interest in the concept of guilty pleasures. If you like a song, you like a song, regardless of who it's by. So now, I listen to what I want and whatever gets listened to, gets added.

Anyway, the reason for my rambling about LastFM is that this month is two years since I first registered on the site. And as I'm always sharing music for you to listen to, I thought it might be interesting to show you what I spend most of my time listening listen to. If you've been coming here for a while, there'll probably be little to no surprise as to what makes up my charts. It's all the usual suspects. I can't see anything that would come as a shock, but I guess that at least it proves that I really do listen to what I blog about. It's not entirely accurate. The CDs I listen to in my car obviously don't get added and there have been a couple of times when data has been lost through my iPod not scrobbling. But on the whole it's pretty accurate. In the last two years, I've listened to roughly 20,984 songs. My most listened to song is Radiohead's 'Videotape' with 37 plays. The first song played after I registered was 'She's Attracted To' by The Young Knives, while the most recent was 'Tower Of Song' by Leonard Cohen.

Currently at fifth place with 329 plays is Cat Power and while I don't generally need an excuse to post some music by here, this seems like a pretty good one. So here are three tracks taken from her Peel Session in 2000. I never realised what a big fan Peel was of hers until I read The Peel Sessions but it turns out that as well as recording two sessions, she also did a live set from his home Peel Acres. Now we all know about Chan's love of Bob Dylan so I guess it's no surprise to find two of the tracks are Dylan covers. More surprising, is the cover of 'Wonderwall' by Oasis. Given the Cat Power treatment, it loses it's lighters aloft, lads anthem quality in favour of a more sober, sombre reading.

Cat Power - hard times in New York town (Bob Dylan cover Peel Session 20/07/2000)

Cat Power - he was a friend of mine (Bob Dylan cover Peel Session 20/07/2000)

Cat Power - wonderwall (Oasis cover Peel Session 20/07/2000)

mp3 / music / cat power