I have quite a large music collection – built up over many years; including vinyl singles, LPs, CDs and more recently almost exclusively downloads from various locations. So I thought it may be interesting to select a walking related song for each day of my upcoming Coast to Coast walk in June – an anthem for the day if you will.
To manage this extensive music collection (about 30,000 tracks) I use a cracking little program called “Media Monkey” which is great for managing MP3 tags, file names and album art, but also has a great search facility.
I stuck the word “walk” into the search field and hit “Go” and it returned an amazing 139 tracks. I was quite surprised – I’d expected a couple of dozen perhaps, but not that many. I did a bit of pruning and removed duplicates (tracks from the same artist on multiple albums) and the list dropped to 91.
That 91 includes any song title with the word “walk” in it – so “Walking On Sunshine” is in there (twice – once for Eddie Grant and once for Katrina) and so is “Parisienne Walkways” along with all the usual “Walk The Line” and “These Boots Were Made For Walking” etc.
Perhaps the most remarkable occurrence was the song title “Walk Away”, which appeared a total of nine times, with seven different artists names. One or two are covers, but most are different songs with the same title – quite bizarre. For interest; Black Sabbath, Christina Aguilera, Franz Ferdinand, Marie Pierre, Sisters Of Mercy, Stiff Little Fingers and Westlife – which also shows the eclectic nature of my musical tastes.
It was quite tough to narrow down the list of 91 to a final list of 13 – one-per-day for each walking day. But I managed it. You’ll have to wait and see what I chose – but there’s only 96 days to go before I set off, so not long.
6 thoughts on “Coast to Coast 2011 – Walking Songs”
Please warm the cockles of an old folkie’s heart by ensuring that “Walk Awhile” by Fairport Convention is in your final list. This is also available for your listening pleasure on YOUTUBE.
Well I pride myself on my wide ranging musical taste, but I’ve just downloaded this and listened to it and I’m afraid to say it hasn’t made it to the final 13
It’s certainly a foot-tapper, but not really something I could listen to more than the once 🙂
Love this topic,
I too own a large collection of music cds which normaly clogs every available nuk & crany in the car as I drive to Lakeland, I have a ritual to listen to the killers or something that the lyrics can loop over in my head as I walk & I can at least try to enjoy ‘Am I human or am I dancer’ is one that continuly loops but is copeable..
Take Thats ‘could it be magic’ however is not, but is usaly the one that fries the brain as I knock of the miles.
Completely agree Paul – there are certain songs I would like to walk with in my head, but they rarely survive first contact with a song trigger I find on the path. The first sign of heather or curlew and I’m singing Young Ned of The Hill by the Pogues – or a wall that dips into a gully and that’s Pink Floyd – Another (dip) in the Wall – the Proclaimers song usually gets an airing every few weeks and so the list goes on. I believe they’re called Head Splinters 🙂 there’s bugger all you can do about them – fortunately I’ve never listened to Take That, so I can’t carry that little landmine around with me!
Good to see/hear you are still in the land of the living. Have missed your amblings and ramblings. Have you been doing any walking from Christmas and more interesting – did Santa bring you any new hill-walking gear?
Looking forward already to your C to C diary and the music selection.
Ahh Christmas – feels like such a long time ago, but no I didn’t really get any walking related pressies this year. I’m pretty much where I want to be with kit at the momemt, and I probably won’t even need anything new for the C2C. I used some fleece lined Craghopper trousers this winter, which I’d bought in the summer sales – and they were superb.
I’m also really looking forward to the C2C, 13 weeks and 5 days to go 🙂