The sheep is jumping a fence.

I can't wait to play music with the crew again.

The Shblogger just sent me a mix with a challenge: if I figure out the defining theme shared by all 16 songs, I get a special prize. So I thought it'd be fun to document my progress, for the enjoyment of the Shblogger and for anyone else who's interested.

Day 1

I gave an initial listen to the mix on my way to work this morning and jotted down some impressions. Of course, the first conclusion I jumped to would be that all the songs would be linked by some common word or element in the lyrics. Between tracks two and three I thought I had it licked, cause both "Eleanor Rigby" as sung by Aretha Franklin and "Take my Out" by Franz Ferdinand have the word, "lonely" in them. I thought I would have the pleasure of collecting my fee after a mere 20 minutes of work.

However my whole lyrical theory was blown soon thereafter by track #8, "L'absente" by Yann Tiersen. Lyricless. Pure instrumental. It's a nice mix, though. Could it be that the only correlation between all the songs are that the Shblogger thinks they rock?

My next step was to see if there was some musical connection. Like, "each song is paired with one in the key of its minor third." I wrote a list of all the keys the songs are in, and they neither correlate in any way, nor spell anything significant. Afterwards I wrote this theory off due to the unlikelihood that the Shblogger would be able to tell exactly what key the songs were in. Away from his piano, at any rate.

Since then I've been looking for linguistic connections between song and artist, such as "the last letter in the first name of the band is the same as the second word in the song title," and such, but I don't think that that's it. Though if it is something like that, I'll be mad that I thought of it the first day and then wrote it off.

My next step is to correlate track numbers on albums and see if there's any link there. Or perhaps look at the singer's first names, or what they drove, or where the album was produced, or what color hair they all have on the cover, etc, etc.

Facts that may help: The Shblogger has a video iPod. He composed the list from said iPod while driving. He has good musical taste, and can understand French. He has a medical background, a wife and child, and red hair.