The Playlist

I have learned something about my relationship with Mrs PM during the year or so of lockdown and restrictions due to COVID-19. It is something that has surprised both of us. 

Over the past year, we have reserved a couple of hours on Friday and/or Saturday night to relax and just chat. Since we are locked down we cannot go out anywhere and so we just talk about life with the assistance of a glass of wine or a beer. 

We used to do this before lockdown in a pub or a restaurant and the one thing that we needed at home was some background music. Usually in a pub, you have no choice about the music that is playing in the background and, as you can imagine, the pop music that plays in these places is not my favourite. I tolerate it because I have to.

Home is a different matter. This is my home and I want to control the music. Mrs PM has the same outlook – she wants the control the music too.

The problem is that our tastes in music are poles apart. She likes dance music and all manner of modern pop music that I despise. I like older pop music and rock music, including progressive rock, heavy metal and basically (as she calls it) “weird music”.

There is no overlap. Here is a Venn Diagram illustrating the music we have in common.

I have all of my music stored electronically on my laptop and I still buy CDs because I want to own it. Mrs PM is transient in her taste and when she hears something she likes, she plays it to death and then discards it when she is fed up of it. She used to buy CDs and then commit an act of pure sacrilege that I can barely bring myself to type – she GIVES AWAY HER CDs. She thinks that I should do the same. 

I know – it’s incredible.

Now she has decided that she won’t buy any more CDs and has taken up a paid Spotify account. This is good for her and I also considered it but for reasons that I am not going to go into now, I decided against it. I have a free Spotify account that I sometimes use to discover new music which results in me buying the CD eventually.

We decided to treat ourselves to a Sonos speaker, a wireless device that you can speak to with Google Assistant and will allow us to set alarms, ask questions, and most importantly play music from Mrs PM’s Spotify account, opening us up to a vast database of music.

If only we could agree on what music to play, given that it has to live in the overlap in the Venn Diagram above.

One Friday, we decided to attack this problem head on. Our discussion was; “What music can we possibly have in common?”

At first we took the tentative steps down the path. 

MRS PM: Do you like Britney Spears?

PM: (having eventually stopped laughing) Of course not.

MRS PM: How about Rihanna? Or Madonna?

PM: NO! I hate them. Oh hang on – there are a couple of Madonna songs I quite like. 

This one:

That was a start. I asked about classic progressive rock and she agreed that this song was good:

That is two songs in common. Over the weeks, we have chatted about music for the first hour or so, popping songs onto the Sonos and either adding them to a Spotify playlist or discarding them. Both of us have been willing to experiment and listen to suggestions and it has only bloody well worked. 

We have built up a considerable playlist of music that we both actually like and this includes, broadly, 1970’s disco, some glam rock, 1970’s David Bowie, 1980’s electronic pop music, ELO, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, some Nine Inch Nails, one heavy metal song by System of a Down, Some Simon and Garfunkel, one Rush song, early Elton John, Blondie, The Police, Roxy Music, Muse and many many more.

We have between 250 and 300 songs that we can both listen to in the background without either of us complaining. And we are adding more each week.

That’s incredible.

We are both delighted because we can take this playlist with us on holiday or on trips and chat over background music that doesn’t leave one or both of us screaming “For crying out loud TURN THAT CRAP OFF!”

Here a couple of songs from the list to finish off.

The moral of the post is - you can always find common ground and something to agree on.