A week of music on Twitter

18 min readDec 11, 2015

During May, I had the pleasure of hosting the We Love Aural account on Twitter (@We_Love_Aural), a rotating-curation account devoted to music. There are different ways you can approach doing this — you can just post songs/clips in real time, as many or as few as you like, and converse with people listening as they respond to your choices; you can ask people questions about what they like and have active conversations; you can focus on your favourite genres/time periods; you can even take requests. I decided to treat it like I was programming a week’s worth of radio listening — or, for Australian readers, like I was programming about 4 separate episodes of Rage — with a continuing stream of music of my choice reflecting my tastes, music that had been meaningful to me at different stages of my life, and new things I’d recently discovered (some really new, some just relatively new to me). Doing it this way requires programming a lot of music; just how much work was involved took me by surprise. (How much, and how I did it, I’ll come back to.)

There’s a balance to be struck, whatever approach you take. It’s an account subscribed to by music fans of all types, ages and tastes. Their musical interests run all over the map, and “hits and memories and old favourites” are always popular. Throwing crowd-pleasers in is a good idea; avoiding doing so completely in favour of the self-consciously hip and obscure is less likely to succeed. For me, this meant at the very least that if I was playing a band I liked who may not be that well known to a wide audience, that unless I had a particular favourite song that I just had to play, I should choose one of their best known songs, something that would represent them well. At other places and times, it was easy enough to program some well known bands/artists and their hit songs. Accordingly, some song choices can look a little predictable, but that’s as much by design as anything.

I’d spent spare moments leading up to my turn on the account making lists of songs I might program, and found myself organising multiple sub-lists: genres, eras, themes. That also helped in doing searches for songs that might fit somewhere but didn’t roll straight out of my brain. A growing list of great cover versions led me to search out some more, from my own memory banks and then from around the web. A mix CD I made years ago for friends I’d entitled “Girlvoices” (entirely of female-sung tracks I liked) inspired me to make a long list of female singers and women-fronted bands so I could do multiple sessions of vocally bloke-free music. I made lists of blues and soul tracks, and instrumentals, of raucous rock music, and “easy listening” (because I sometimes think about what a decent “easy listening” radio station could play as opposed to the mawkish “soft rock” I hear in taxis tuned to “smooth” stations). Given I had a list of cover songs, I also made a complementary list of obscure originals of songs made more famous by cover versions, as well as songs that had not so much been covered as had morphed (via adaptation, sampling, or, well, stealing (allegedly)) into other songs.

The fact that the invitation came suddenly made things a bit tricky, in that while I had many dozens of songs listed when I received the invitation to take over within a few days, if you’re going to do the heavy kind of programming I had in mind over the course of a week, you need hundreds. To play four songs an hour, every hour between 7am and midnight, every day for seven days (that’s 4 songs x 17 hours x 7 days) is … a lot! Not far shy of 500. I was nowhere near this, so I was scrambling for more, adding to my lists and sub-lists a little bit frantically before I got going, and updating all through the week.

Things evolved organically. Mornings tended to focus on bright, sharp pop music, not least from the new wave of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (a favourite period). “Ladyvoices” sessions followed, then lunchtime cover versions. Given I’d decided to kick off with two contrasting versions of “Stay With Me Baby” (Scott Walker up against Terry Reid), I ended up starting several of the covers lunchtimes with two versions of the same song (two versions of “Creep”, two of “Satisfaction”, you get the idea). Middle afternoons varied, but the late afternoon-early evening was treated as a “commute”, and typically they were a bit loud. I mixed up the middle evening slots, but from 10pm, it was Easy Listening O’clock, and most nights finished with Justin Bieber. (Listen, you’ll see why.)

I programmed my playlist into Twuffer (basically, a program that you can enter a whole series of tweets into in advance, that will publish them at a time you set), so at least I had a fair bit of each morning’s music sorted before I had to think about the rest of the day. Using Twuffer was a tip from a prior host, Paul Webster (@p_webs) which proved very useful. I’d have a list of music, program a chunk of the morning during the previous evening, and then at points during the day I’d program the next few hours.

Little glitches occurred from time to time. Twuffer allows tweets to be programmed at 5 minute intervals, and I generally programmed 4 songs each hour, on the quarter hour. A few times when I had a lot of songs in a particular category I’d up the rate, posting maybe 6 an hour. If I got too keen (and/or it was late at night) I might lose track and accidentally program two songs to appear simultaneously. But the biggest stuff-up was on Wednesday morning, due to an extended internet drop-out at home. I had a few songs already programmed for the morning but they were quickly exhausted. I had to run into the office and spend more time than I should have trying to get the rest of the day sorted. Given my master songlist was done on my Macbook Air and couldn’t be read on my work PC, I had to make it up on the spot. I’d been meaning to do a ’70s slot, so you might notice I ended up programming a very extended ’70s songlist that went from mid-morning until late afternoon. Not too shabby for a spontaneous and slightly panic-stricken effort if I do say so myself. But you just start with Bowie and go from there.

I switched it up a bit on the weekend, chilling it up a bit here, and shambolic-pop-ing it up a bit there. And of course what’s a Friday night without a dance party?

In all of this, I managed to miss several categories that I’d had listed in advance. A section on movie soundtracks fell by the wayside, a section of songs with Asian references (“Hong Kong Garden”, “Visions of China”, “Woman From Tokyo”, “Holiday in Cambodia”, you get the idea) got left out, and a bunch of artists that were listed in some category or other also managed to fall through the cracks. (No Tom Waits, what?)

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll ever get to program Rage, so this was the next best thing. (If I do ever get to program Rage, you can assume you’ll see stuff from the list below.) And Justin Bieber slowed right down is pretty awesome. Be a Belieber.

Song names have Youtube links.

Monday morning: late 70s/early 80s

Only Ones — Another Girl, Another Planet

David Johansen — Funky But Chic

Buzzcocks — Ever Fallen in Love

Willie Nile — Sing Me a Song

Jesus and Mary Chain — Just Like Honey

Wall of Voodoo — Mexican Radio

Pretenders — Up The Neck

Television — See No Evil

Late Monday morning: Ladyvoices

Massive Attack — Unfinished Sympathy