Explain Your Most Played

By Keith Plocek Wed., May 30 2007 at 4:34 PM

Categories: Hidden Tracks

Coming in at Number Seven...

There’s a lot of games you can play with iTunes and winamp players and whatever. There’s magic iPod. There are those Myspace-type questionnaires that everybody fills out and forwards but nobody reads. And there are those “What’s on your iPod” features that are everywhere these days. But I think I’ve found the most revealing variation – the “What are the top ten songs in your ‘Most Played’ folder?” angle.

I’m gonna be putting a few local music luminaries to the test with these over the next few months and weeks. For our inaugural edition, I enlisted Michael Haaga, the former thrash-metal singer-guitarist in dead horse and Demonseeds. Most readers of this blog and paper will know that thudding stuff is no longer his bag, and as this test shows, he really means it when he says he is all about the pop these days. -- John Nova Lomax

So away we go – Mike Haaga, tell me what’s on your chart:

1. “Cannonball,” Damien Rice

2. “Secret Heart,” Feist

3. “Keep on Smilin,” Wet Willie. “I was thinking of covering this song for awhile,” Haaga notes.

4. (This was another Feist song. I miswrote the title.)

5. “Crazy,” Gnarls Barkley

6. “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me),” Frankie Laine. “This one might make me look pretty cool,” Haaga says. “It reminds me of being in New Orleans. Phil Anselmo loves to sing this song.”

7. “Fantasy,” Mariah Carey. “John, I don’t know if I can go on with this anymore. Should I really be making this stuff public?”

8. “True Love Will Find You In the End,” Beck. “It’s a Daniel Johnston cover,” Haaga says.

9. “Toxic,” Britney Spears. “What number are we on now? When will this be over? I have to say this only has about ten plays.”

10. “Bird on a Wire,” K.D. Lang. “It’s a Leonard Cohen cover. Man, if we could just go on a little more, I’ve got Slim Thug’s ‘Like a Boss,’ a bunch of Terrorizer, and Elvis Costello and Thin Lizzy. I don’t make any apologies for any of this. It wouldn’t be any different from when I was a kid. I grew up listening to pop music, and that’s what has stuck with me even after I listened to tons of metal and tons of Southern rock.”

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