The truth is I don’t listen to music all that often from my iPhone.  I have a long commute (frequently over two hours in the car every work day) but I usually spend this time listening to audio books or podcasts.  My job is fairly interactive and our office has a fully open floor plan so I can’t play music at my desk or zone out with head phones.  And at home we tend to listen either to the radio or to CDs.  But this morning on my way to work I turned my iPhone on shuffle and listened to random things from my music library – and I remembered how much fun this is to do.

I have very eclectic musical tastes which means shuffling my library generates some enjoyable contrasts.  I’ve loaded dozens of CDs on my phone, downloaded a few songs and albums from iTunes, and I get most of the random songs that Starbucks offers for free every week, so when I ‘play music at random’ (which was the command I gave Siri this morning) I never know what I’m going to get.  Today I heard The Police, Billy Joel, The Lost Dogs, Mumford and Sons, The Roots, Keith Green, The Rolling Stones, Adam Again, Five for Fighting, The Beatles, and Cage the Elephant.

What’s fun about this is that I like all of this music but would never purposely create a play list that throws it all together.  Listening to many of these songs or artists triggers memories of the first time I heard them; others I haven’t listened to in so long that I instead remember the last time I heard them.  It’s a fun musical trip down memory lane and a nice reminder of the many things that have shaped me as a person and refreshed me on my journey over the past few decades.

How about you?  What’s on your phone and how often do you listen to it?  Do you ever ‘shuffle’ your music or only listen to songs ‘in order’ when you play them? Feel free to share in comments if you’d like.  And try to find time for music today if you can.