That Was the Day Before Love Came To Town

It's an established tradition at In Aurem A2D to use holidays as opportunities for Surface to Air Full Circle music challenges. Our last was on Thanksgiving.

[Photo credit: Yehia-elal​aily]

You know the drill. (Connection between our game and the WDET-FM Music Head fundraiser is in our first challenge.) Starting with a particular song, chart a path along associated metadata to create a connected playlist; but at some point, reverse course and return along a different metadata path to arrive full circle back at the starting song, in "about an hour" of running time. Bonus points if you only use songs from your personal library (as I always do).

That bonus may get harder to achieve over time, if the trend continues away from music ownership and personal libraries to music access and personal playlists via streaming services.

To celebrate Valentine's Day in the USA, our starting/ending song is U2's "When Love Comes to Town" (featuring B. B. King).


Full-Size table here. Annotated table with metadata associations here.

A worthy effort at almost exactly an hour (within the margin of error on the published running times). However, it makes more use of direct song title to song title transitions than previous lists, something to watch in the future. Previous lists can be found in the Surface to Air 2012 Retrospective.

While you listen to any or all of the tracks along our journey, check out this Brain Pickings thought piece,  Calculating the Odds of Finding Your Soulmate. Happy Valentine's Day!

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #52            

Artist: U2

Title: Rattle and Hum
Genre: Rock
Year: 1988





Music buyers who only know an industry dominated by iTunes can't imagine a time when you needed to buy an entire double LP set just to get the one or two tracks you really wanted. The feature film Rattle and Hum may have been negatively characterized by some critics as "an accidental mockumentary," but the performances are solid. For me, the highlights are "When Love Comes to Town," a hard-charging blues duet with B. B. King, and the equal-parts plaintive and haunting "All I Want Is You."


© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.