Turns Out I Have Laughably Narrow Taste In Music

I’ve been playing with Pandora, an excellent service that is supposed to learn your taste in music and play more stuff like that. It works by identifying qualities that you like, such as subtle vocal harmonies, major rock tonalities, piano melodies, and so forth, and qualities you don’t like, such as James Blunt, and playing you only songs that seem to pass these tests. (It’s not meant to work outside America, so tell nobody I showed you this.) So I put in “The Divine Comedy”, and it played my a track I’d never heard before, and I liked it. Then it had a couple of bad guesses, and then it started improving. And then it played me a song I really liked, Songs That We Sing, by a French girl I’d never heard of, called Charlotte Gainsbourg. I’m going to try something potentially disastrous now and embed a YouTube video in my blog. (Oh, God, I feel dirty just typing that. I shall console myself with the idea that YouTube is really just Google Video in a cheap, consumerist disguise…) Anyhow, here’s the song in question:

I felt quite pleased with myself. I usually don’t stray far outside my little musical comfort zone, full of piano melodies I could never hope to reproduce, complex percussive things I wouldn’t know how to reproduce, and dulcet baritones I’ve been asked not to reproduce. There are very few songs with female lead vocals in my collection, other than commercialist pop I’ve inherited from somewhere and an Alanis Morrisette album. Oh, and Air. I thought I’d discovered something different here.

So I ran the name through Google, and learned that this was an album written by Air, with lyrics by Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon. So well done, Pandora. Music Genome project, indeed. An RSS feed could have managed that!

Pandora, why is this song playing? Based on the music you’ve told us you liked, we played this song because it contains being-written-by-the-same-guy, along with many other qualities identified by the Music Genome Project.

Pah.