This is what is intentioned to be a weekly series (although as previously mentioned, I’m not good with self-imposed deadlines, so it will appear when it appears).
I had only vaguely noticed a playlist on Spotify entitled Discover Weekly and had never really bothered with it. That was until J (age 24), the elder of my two sons, alerted me to it, largely because his version of said playlist seemed to have a lot of stuff that I like on it. To be fair, his main playlist owes a lot to stuff he’s heard me playing over the years – I’ve schooled him well!
Anyway, I’ve started exploring my own Discover Weekly as a result. I can generally categorise the 30 songs on each week’s list as follows:
- Stuff already on a playlist but in a different version (e,g, full length version, radio edit, etc) – no discovering here.
- Stuff I’ve heard of that isn’t on a playlist because I limit the number of songs by one artist on some of them.
- Stuff I’ve heard of that isn’t on a playlist because I consider it to be complete and utter bilge.
- Stuff I think I haven’t heard of but then realise I have heard before after all.
- The odd genuine new discovery
My worry is that entries in this series may get a bit “samey”, but hey, let’s give it a go.
I’ll pick a tune each week and jot a few lines about it. The tune will be selected by using the date the playlist was released (if it’s the 31st, song 30 will get picked). This week’s list was out on 19th December, so song 19 it is.
My initial reaction was that I hadn’t got the faintest idea what this was. A spot of research confirmed an initial hunch that Michael Penn is indeed related to Sean Penn (brother). This did little to raise my expectations of what I was about to listen to. Once I started playing it, it sounded somewhat familiar, possibly because it’s been in my iTunes library since 2015, picking up 3 (presumably random) plays in that time. It deserves to be there. It’s a likeable, catchy tune from 1989 – not ground-breaking, but pleasant. It puts me in mind of Crowded House a bit, and that’s not a bad thing.
The song, released in 1989 didn’t trouble Chart compilers in the UK, but did reach #13 in the US. It’s from his debut album “March”. Quite how it got onto my iTunes library, I cannot explain. I can only think it was on a compilation of some sort that I loaded in. Anyhow, I’ve listened to the song more times in the last four days than I had in the previous seven years, so the algorithm certainly got that one right.
TGG
2 responses to “Discover Weekly #1”
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I’ve loads of things on my laptop hard drive that I’ve obviously downloaded from other blogs at some point over the year, but have no recollection of when and from where. It’s funny how often I then give such a song a listen again many years later and wonder what possessed me in the first instance!!
Just to say, welcome to the blogging world. Good luck and have fun.
Wasting time in the study 
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