Changing tunes with the season

Spring usually does crazy, yet harmless, things to people. As soon as the thermometer passes… Spring usually does crazy, yet harmless, things to people. As soon as the thermometer passes 60, those ridiculously short skirts begin to emerge, various ultimate Frisbee teams swarm to the lawn, and the sound of flip-flops can be heard on every street. New couples find love and public places in which to display their affections. Protesters, awareness groups and student clubs hit the sidewalks to distract the few students who can still concentrate enough to try to attend class.

That’s what spring does. Every year, we’re ready for it (some of us even anticipate the season and try to rush it before it’s here), and almost everyone smiles as these seasonal developments begin.

However, this year, spring has launched an evil plan against me.

One morning, just when I was preparing to break out the capris, baby T-shirt and flip-flops for the first time, the horror struck. I opened my laptop and put my downloaded music folder on shuffle, just like I do every morning. Only that day, I couldn’t find a single song I wanted to hear.

Any other day, I’d interrupt my routine to flip past two or three songs that I wasn’t in the mood for. But that day I clicked the forward button without stopping.

Counting Crows’ “A Long December” was out of the question. So was Faith Hill and Tim McGraw’s “Angry All The Time.” When a chunk of Our Lady Peace started to play, I hit the forward track button with fury. Ben Folds Five was a no-go. Even Bush, my back-in-the-day favorite, wasn’t cutting it.

Spring was telling me I needed cheerful music. And not only did it have to be cheerful, but it had to be light, bubbly and fun, too. That further ruled out my Dixie Chicks songs, which are fun, but always a little too slow or a little too heavy on the twang. Greenday was energetic and bouncy but too loud. Nickel Creek — light, but too introspective. Interpol, too … British.

My hair was still wet. I hadn’t started a pot of coffee. And I still couldn’t find a song I wanted to sing along to. If it had been cold and snowy, or at least gray and rainy, all those songs would have been fine. But with birds chirping in the sad little tree outside my window and the sun beating against my curtains, nothing would do.

Of course, I couldn’t go without music. With the rest of my roommates still asleep, oblivious to the beautiful, yet psychologically destructive, weather outside, the apartment was deafeningly silent. (It takes me about an hour to get ready on a day that doesn’t include sweatpants, so that would have been a long silence, at that.)

There was only one thing I could do to ease the agitation at an apparently fall- and winter-based playlist — weed through the tracks one by one to find the handful of appropriate early-spring tunes and then download some more.

Steve Miller Band got me started. Some of the more beach-tune tracks from Kenny Chesney were added to the list. And I searched (in vain) for “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”

At this point, spring had cut about 20 minutes out of my morning, all because it wouldn’t allow me to listen to “normal” music. It made me stop everything until I had Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” some Sheryl Crow and even that annoying “Sunscreen” song from 1999.

For a moment, I thought of trying to let my lack of spring-appropriate music really make me angry. I tried to feel rushed, upset, annoyed, anything that would tell me Nine Inch Nails was a good idea. But the sunshine, the need to have my window open to the breeze, the sound of my neighbors talking about nothing on their balcony, it was all too pervasive.

I gave in. I found my Pat Green CD. I downloaded a few Barenaked Ladies songs. I was beaten.

Spring took my already weird, eclectic taste in music and diluted and perverted it into bubblegum and fluff. And, sadly, it wasn’t a one-morning affair. I’m still singing Marley in my head (“every little thing, is gonna be alright!”) and wondering if early ’90s Mariah Carey is out of the question.

I hope it rains soon.

As you read this, Erin is probably downloading “Summer Girls.” E-mail her a better spring song at enl1@pitt.edu.