Totally Shuffled..what's it all about...

Totally Shuffled ..what's it all about...

On January 1^st 2012 I sat down at my laptop with a virtual blank piece of paper and wondered what I was going to write about. I had finished my first book, “Turn Left At The Womble”, all about my first ever trip (at the age of 48) to the Glastonbury festival in 2010 with my 18 year- old daughter and her best mate, the previous October and really just knew I had to write something else. But I wasn’t really sure what exactly I was going to write about. All I did know was that I had to write something.  I had been to Glastonbury in 2011 by myself and however much I love the place,and however much I could have carried on, it would have just been additional chapters to the “…Womble”.  There didn’t seem much point. I wanted to write something different and longer. I sat there with my iPod in my hand wondering what to do and wondering what to listen to for inspiration. Nothing inspired me as I scrolled through the nearly 10,000 tracks. I set it to shuffle simply because nothing seemed to spring out at me. And then, in a dim flash of inspiration, it hit me. I could write about whatever came up on the iPod. If I did it for every day during the year, then by the time it came to December 31^st, I might just have a book pulled together. So there it was-the seeds of an idea.

I limited myself to a few self-imposed rules. I had to write every single day, whatever else was going on in my life, I was going to write at least 500 words per day. The only other rules were that I had to strictly stick to the first track every day that came up on shuffle, even if I didn’t like it very much or didn't initially have much to say about it; and that I had to write about a different artist every day. So that ruled out 366 Bob Dylan tracks or one Bob Dylan track and 365 tracks by The Fall. But that was it.  Nothing else. I decided at an early stage that I would write about anything that came into my mind as the track was playing and therefore there were a fair few times when I went completely off at a tangent and didn’t write about music at all, or if I did it, then it didn’t turn out quite like I had envisaged it. Sometimes it was quite autobiographical and personal, and sometimes (looking back) I wonder how I managed to string out 500 words on some song that didn’t mean anything to me. But I did, and in some ways that’s the whole point.  

I do know that I contradicted myself throughout the year and actually wrote some stuff that now I find myself disagreeing with. But again, I decided not to go for some editing thing to make it all coherent. The good thing is about music for me is that it always changes and what I love on January 1^st, I may detest on December 31^st and vice versa.

Despite my best efforts there was still loads about Glastonbury in there as well.

There are two things that don’t change though. The Sisters of Mercy will always be nonsense. And “Do You Wanna Dance?” by Silver is one of the funniest songs ever.

      

You can get “Totally Shuffled” here (as a Kindle book):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA

and here as a paperback!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-The/dp/149495687X