/dev/audio: Breathless, The Corrs

Next to my casually-held belief that Bush actually won the election — something that I’ve thought of as a dead issue for quite a while now (and hooboy, how wrong I was!) — I think my worst habit is a certain selective deafness when it comes to music.

No, not the part about listening to utter crap, although I do that, too. See the song mentioned above? It’s been playing on repeat for more than six hours today. Just the one song.

I didn’t notice. It’s a nice song, but is it that good? No, it just falls into that category of music that fills the background pleasantly without ever attracting my attention.

I have a large collection of such songs, although obviously I could get by with one or two. This repetition isn’t usually a problem, since I live alone, but I’ve heard some grumbling when it happens at the office, and it was once taken as a planned insult by my college roommate’s live-in girlfriend. She simply couldn’t believe that someone could play Debbie Gibson’s Out of the Blue album for seven hours straight without noticing, and she was sure I knew that she hated it.

The funny thing was that I hadn’t realized she was in the apartment in the first place.

The LXG soundtrack sounded promising enough that I decided to support the iMS exclusive release of it. There was some other stuff sitting in my shopping cart, so I bought it all, synced the iPod, and drove to work.

You wouldn’t think that LXG, Dean Martin, Liz Phair, John Philip Sousa, and Ray Brown would make a good driving mix, but it worked.

I was in love with LeAnn Rimes even before the recent makeover that shows off her physical maturity and taste in lingerie. Unfortunately, while I appreciate the eye candy, what I love is her talent, and her new album Twisted Angel doesn’t make much use of it. The songs aren’t wretched, exactly, they’re just blah. It’s like an hour spent listening to the previews for next week’s WB shows.

In fact, I expect to hear several of these tunes on Smallville soon. Perhaps Life goes on the next time Chloe is pining for Clark, or The safest place when Lana has to be rescued from a blizzard, Suddenly for the big graduation day. The title track can turn up when Lex goes cruising for brunettes in Metropolis in his latest sports car.

Of course, the woman he finds will turn out to be the Disposable Kryptonite Mutant of the Week, but he’s getting better at dealing with that.