I don’t remember how it started, but for about two and a half years—from July 2014 to January 2017—my wife and I played a game where each day we would randomly draw two prompts written on pieces of index cards and use those to come up with something to listen to. Whichever recording(s) we chose, we’d add to a cumulative playlist for that month, which is how I can be so precise about how long the game lasted.
For most of that period, we were not subscribed to a streaming service, so the music we selected was drawn entirely from our own library of music that we’d downloaded or (mostly) ripped from decades’ worth of CDs. We’d gotten married not long before, and this was a fun way to test our joint musical knowledge while exploring our newly combined collection, each of us discovering or getting introduced to lots of stuff along the way.
What killed the game, I think, was signing up for a streaming service, because suddenly we had infinitely more music to explore, and our discovery would have only been slowed down by having to stick to each day’s parameters.
For all this time since, though, I’ve had the bag full of prompts sitting in the open hutch of my desk. I’ve just pulled them down for the first time in years, and that’s what I’ve got for you this week: five randomly drawn pairings, a few listening options that would meet those sets of criteria—and an invitation for you to play along in the comments or on your own.
“Name starts with G” + “Name starts with P”
Grace Jones, Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions
Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
Patty Griffin
Gram Parsons
Prince, Graffiti Bridge (Thank you, Prince, for giving me a second chance to see if I could spell “graffiti” right. I could not.)
“Family act” + “1945-1954”
The Maddox Brothers & Rose
The Mills Brothers
The York Brothers
The Carter Family
The Andrews Sisters
“Spanish-language” + “Album you owned on vinyl”
The Clash, Combat Rock (Remember that bit in “Should I Stay or Should I Go”?)
Jerry Jeff Walker, ¡Viva Terlingua! (The Spanish is limited to the album’s title, and yes, my poor showing for this pairing is personally embarrassing to me.)
“Album with at least one track shorter than 2 minutes” + “At least 2 albums before fame”
Prince, For You (Easy to come up with, since the track in question is the title song that leads off his very first album. Thanks again, Prince!)
Willie Nelson, Country Favorites, Willie Nelson Style (“Columbus Stockade Blues,” “My Window Faces the South,” and “Home in San Antone”)
U2, Boy (“Into the Heart” and “The Ocean”)
The White Stripes, The White Stripes (“Broken Bricks,” “When I Hear My Name,” Slicker Drips”)
Pink Floyd, More (“Party Sequence” and “A Spanish Piece”)
Fleetwood Mac, English Rose (“Jigsaw Puzzle Blues”)
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Police Helicopter” and “You Always Sing the Same”)
The Roots, Organix (7 of its 17 tracks came in that short!)
“Name starts with A” + “Contains a cover”
Ain’t But The One Way by Sly & The Family Stone (The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”)
Alabama Wild Man by Jerry Reed (The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville”)
All We Are Saying… by Bill Frisell (The whole wonderful thing consists of covers of John Lennon songs.)
Already Free by the Derek Trucks Band (The Sweet Inspirations’ “Sweet Inspiration”)
American Tunes by Allen Toussaint (Paul Simon’s, yes, “American Tune”)
And yes, at least some of these are going into The Funnel.