Blogocentric Formulations

Over Yourself

         

| Day 1 |





"Over Yourself"
by Heart of Gold

Another year of "The Soundtrack of Your Life"  is off and running!

It's only fair that I start this year's Soundtrackers with the song I listened to the most last year, at least according to Spotify. It's also emblematic of a lot of the songs I'm going to use for this year's activity, which are songs from artists that I hadn't really heard of before, and who I mostly don't follow or listen to beyond this one song. The reason for that is because I listened to Spotify a lot last year, and used their "Discover Weekly" playlist, which takes everything you've been listening to and finds new recommendations each week. For most of the weeks of the year, I tried to listen to all thirty songs Spotify would recommend (or at least most of them) and add the ones I liked to my playlist to revisit throughout the year. My 2022 playlist is composed mostly of those songs, with others added in as I found them elsewhere (usually as part of film and television soundtracks).

I don't really know anything about the artist Heart of Gold; there's very little biography information on Spotify and since the artist chose a fairly generic name, most of my quick Google research either points to the much more famous song of the same name by Neil Young, or The Heart of Gold Band which was formed by the husband and wife team of Keith and Donna Jena Godchaux after they left The Grateful Dead. So not a lot of biographical information or fun facts to be had with this one.

The reason why I listened to this song so much in 2022 is work related. Not because we used the song for any of my projects at work but because I spent a lot of nights working late this year, and I tend to listen to the same songs over and over when I want to get into a state of flow. So for more than a couple nights, I'd put the kids to bed, my wife would go to bed, and then I'd go downstairs to the office to put in a more couple hours of work. When I needed to buckle down and focus on a task like putting together a draft of the credits for a film, I'd put this song on repeat and let it play in the background while I worked. It's upbeat and energetic enough that it kept me awake while I was reviewing contracts or typing away at the keyboard late into the night.

I tried listening to some of Heart of Gold's other stuff on Spotify because I liked this song so much, but nothing really sparked my interest. This might end up being just a one-hit wonder that I really dig listening to.