Ooh, just back from Alaska and already I have a bloggy task to do: Jeremy has passed me a "musical baton". Here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer:

14.01 GB, or 3387 songs (10 days’ worth!).

The last CD I bought was:

I happened to be in the process of purchasing it when the musical baton got handed to me yesterday: "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me" by the Cure, from the iTunes music store. I have an ancient, battered cassette version of this, of course, but I never got around to buying the album on CD. Now I’ve skipped the CD stage altogether and gone straight to MP3. As for the last actual CD I bought…gosh, I don’t even remember. Probably the soundtrack to Return of the King.

Song playing right now:

"Mile over Mecca" by the Sadies.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

Okay, this was the question that stumped me. I guess, like Jeremy, I tend not to listen very often to some of the songs that mean a lot to me - not necessarily because I don’t want to dilute their impact, but because their impact can be so great that they’re difficult to listen to (songs like "Atmosphere" by Joy Division and "Hold On To Your Friends" by Morrissey spring to mind in this category). On the other hand, many of the songs that I listen to a lot at any given time are kind of "passing fads" which are not necessarily representative of my listening habits as a whole (for example, I’m quite into Interpol at the moment, but only time will tell whether they become long-term favorites or not - and I suspect not…).

So I’ve tried to find some middle ground by picking songs that both have some degree of meaning to me and that I still listen to on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all five songs are from the late 80s and early 90s - my "difficult teenage years"…

1. "Where The Streets Have No Name" by U2 - Not the best U2 song, or even my favorite U2 song, but my first hearing of the opening bars of this song turned me into a lifelong U2 fan - and whenever I hear this song, I just have to sing along with it for all I’m worth.

2. "When We Two Parted" by the Afghan Whigs - "When We Two Parted" is my favorite song off my favorite album by one of my favorite bands ever. I’ve always meant to write an article about the Afghan Whigs the way I’ve written about the Cure and U2, but I think my feelings towards this band are almost too personal for me to feel comfortable writing about them at length in a public forum. Suffice it to say that there is something irresistible in the lust, guilt and anger expressed by Greg Dulli’s musical persona, and his cruel-yet-sexy lyrics are backed by a band which rocks so hard you just never get tired of hearing them.

3. "Haus der Lüge" by Einstürzende Neubauten - Not only is this song an absolutely brilliant piece of "musical architecture", I credit it with helping me learn German pronunciation: trying to sing the phrase "Gott hat sich erschossen, ein Dachgeschoss wird ausgebaut", quickly and repeatedly, will certainly help you figure out your "-ichs" and "-achs". I listened to this song a great deal when I first moved to Freiburg, and I still listen to it a great deal because it’s so darn cool.

4. "John Finn’s Wife" (the Live Seeds version) by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - I chose this song for a couple of reasons: 1) It’s the first Nick Cave song I really got into, 2) I have happy memories of dancing like a lunatic with Jeremy to this song when we first met, 3) the song is a paragon of the "Southern Gothic" thing Nick Cave used to do so well, and 4) the "Live Seeds" version of the song is simply searing, and it gives you a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be at a Nick Cave gig.

5. "The Same Deep Water As You" by the Cure - This is one of the many Cure songs that got me through high school. It’s a nearly 10-minute-long dirge awash with massive amounts of reverb and drenched in gloom - what fun! If I had a penny for every time I played this song on my Walkman on the way to school, I would be a rich, rich woman. I only recently acquired this song in a digital format; I hadn’t listened to it in a while, since all I had was a warped version of it on cassette, and I had forgotten just how much I liked it. Depending on your point of view, it’s either incredibly atmospheric or unbearably dreary. I think it’s a perfect song for late-night listening.

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

1. Mark 2. Heck 3. Liddy 4. Meg 5. Mutti