Record Collection Recollections #3: My Old Car's Taste In Music

That's my old car, photographed on the day we said goodbye. I shed a tear, but I cry at most things to be honest.

Although I'll miss that old girl now that she's gone to find her new travelling companion, I won't entirely miss her rather selective taste in music.

I mentioned yesterday how I keep Sam's music on CDs in the car, with my own current album selections on a separate memory stick, so I can toggle between the two. Over the past few months though, I'd begun to notice a rather unusual thing... the car would refuse to play certain tracks on the memory stick. For example, from the latest Billy Bragg record, the final track, Ten Mysterious Photos That Can't Be Explained, would never play. The mp3 was in the folder when I checked it on my pc, and would play fine in the house, but the car ignored it completely. 

Similarly, I didn't even know that the first track on the new Half Man Half Biscuit album was I'm Getting Buried In The Morning, since I've only ever listened to that record in the car, and the old car always started the album at track 2.

There are other examples (and I'm left wondering how many albums over the past six years I've not actually listened to in their entirety), but the most egregious omission was the old car's refusal to play The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973, by Hamish Hawk, arguably the best track on last year's album Heavy Elevator. I eventually fooled the car into playing that by re-recording the song as a separate mp3 and inserting it as an additional file into the folder. But that was a lot of hard work to get around my car's musical prejudices.

Thinking that the problem might lie in a faulty memory stick, I even bought a new one and copied all my current music onto that... only to find the very same tracks left on the hard shoulder. I'd just about convinced myself it must be a problem with the ripping process, and that certain tracks just weren't being ripped well enough for the car's USB to read...

...until I got my new car and inserted the same memory, only to discover that every track now plays fine. 

The Billy Bragg song mentioned above is all about the dangers of wasting your life on internet rabbit holes. Ironically I've just dug another one and, if  you've read this far, your time has probably been wasted too. So why not waste a little more and listen to the song...?

And ten mysterious photos that can't be explained

Are draining away the best of my day

And fragments of songs that I never wrote

Are rotting in the pockets of my winter coat