Day 4: Música

I've been looking forward to this day. I was recently asked by a friend what kind of music I liked and I couldn't answer until much later.

I have a very eclectic taste in music. It's extremely hard to predict what I will and won't like because my opinion is so VERY unique. But in pondering the question my friend asked last week, I realized that I have three standards for the music I listen to:

1. Technical skill


2. Musical simplicity


3. Lyrical complexity

For the most part, every single piece of music I voluntarily own falls into these three categories. If a song in particular falls short of any of these, it means it excelled in at least one of the others to the point that it was worth it for me.

Technical skill: I have almost perfect pitch. If a singer has questionable (or bad) pitch, I probably won't give them a chance. It would take some SPECTACULAR lyrics for me to get past bad pitch. Even if pitch is good, if the tone quality of singer's voice is below average, I probably won't enjoy listening. Also, in most cases the singer has to have good annunciation or I won't listen. If I can't understand the words, I don't want to listen to the song.

Lyrical complexity: By lyrical complexity, I don't mean a lot of ambiguous metaphors. I'm usually pretty dense when it comes to metaphor. But I like big words. I like structure. I like to listen to a song and tell that the writer actually put some effort into crafting the song, as opposed to simply vomiting feelings onto a page and singing them.

Musical simplicity: I don't ask much from my music. I like fun melodies, but arrangement-wise, I'm drawn towards simple. I like simple chord progressions. I like minimal instrumentation. I like vocals, really, so the less drawing away from the vocals and lyrics, the better.

That said, it's really difficult for me to be able to just state artists that I like. I like songs, not artists for the most part. The only artist I can almost be sure to enjoy is Daughtry. Any other artist is basically on a song-by-song or album-by-album basis. I tend to like Lifehouse (I actually bought Smoke & Mirrors after seeing Lifehouse open for Daughtry because they were so good), some Switchfoot, Tim Hughes, and random Broadway musicals (which are far less of an artist and more of a genre).

I'm open to almost any genre of music, but will be turned off pretty quick by bad vocals or cheesy lyrics. To sum things up.