From Fleas to Buffalos

For those who are not familiar with Last.fm, it is a really cool social networking music site where friends can see what people are listening to and make recommendation to them, get info about bands, etc. Anyway, I love to think I have individualistic and unpredictable taste in music. However, a while back, a user on last.fm friended me because he had seen that I was listening to Cactus World News. Whenever I log on to last.fm, it lists what my friends have listened to most recently. It is uncanny how many times what this guy has listened to mirrors what I have listened to (usually away from the computer so there is clearly no case of copying). As an example:

I wrote a while ago about my growing ukulele obsession. In that post I mentioned the Flea ukulele. This lead me to go to Dane Zane’s, the former singer of the Del Fuegos and current children’s singer, Web site to find out about his limited edition DZ Flea Ukuleles. As I was there, I was reminded of his role in the Del Fuegos. I then went to iTunes to listen to some old Del Fuegos while reading an entry on them in Wikipedia. There I saw a mention of the Juliana Hatfield Three and their song “My Sister” which mentions the Del Fuegos. This lead me back to iTunes and Amazon to listen to some old Juliana Hatfield and Blake Babies songs. I listened to the 30 second bits from several albums and was reminded in particular of how much I likes Only Everything and wished I could hear the whole thing. This thought brought me to another Boston band that I listened to heavily in the early 90s, Buffalo Tom. So, I went in to iTunes and listened to the snippets of tracks from several albums but mostly from Let Me Come Over and Big Red Letter Day. I began to regret that I no longer had these songs to listen to. A few minutes later, I go to last.fm and discover that my friend has not only been listening to Buffalo Tom, but the exact two albums I was just pining for. It struck me as a weird coincidence that this guy is listening to the exact albums (both over ten years old) that I am suddenly feeling nostalgic for–as a result of a convoluted process–for the first time in years.

So, I post this for no real purpose other than to note I am not as unique as I like to think…as if Amazon.com’s “other people who bought x also bought…” feature hadn’t taught me that years ago.