Songs for the Continental Divide Trail

Hiking is inherently rhythmic. If there’s rhythm, there’s music.

Music goes wonderfully well with the hiking. I let them both blend in and develop, free of external stimulae other than the environment I’m in, a world away from the constant over-stimulation of modern urban life. This I find a very interesting exercise: let my mind wander and let it choose the music so I become my own algorithm.

On the CDT, every night I wrote down a few key data for the day, among them the songs that had been in my head. I’ve come home with a very interesting database that I’ve now translated into a spreadsheet and eventually the playlist below. The songs are listed in chronological order of first appearance, first to last. It’s a flat list that doesn’t show the relative weight of songs/artists but you can find the weighted list further down the text together with comments and some outstanding facts.

It’s 133 songs even though the playlist embed only browses down to 100. Nine hours long, five months worth.

This is not a list of my favorite songs, not even my favorite hiking songs, it is a list of the songs that showed up during the trip. I would allow anything and I have listed everything that stuck long enough. Only three of them (those by Crush Test Dummies, Tilt and Def Leppard) happened after hearing some recording from external sources in town. The A-ha song was inspired on a live performance by the Silver City hostel gang.

October 2019

Only 3 tracks were not available online from Spotify and they won’t play unless you have a local copy. They’re all beautiful songs:

The latter is a version, original recording by a band named Fiction Factory, unknown to me.

R.E.M.’s Revolution studio version was not available in Spotify either even though it was released as part of a compilation whose disc 2, apparently, Spotify is not aware of. I’ve used a live version of the song for the playlist.

Early entries were surely influenced by the last gig I attended just a few days before departure (Suede) and by watching Bohemian Rhapsody (again) during the inward flight.

This is the playlist in spreadsheet form showing the full 133 entries in chronological order of appearance together with the number of appearances for each.

Outstanding facts

There was a total of 133 songs from 55 artists with the most popular being the Manic Street Preachers. This is the list of the most popular artists by number of different songs:

And the same list by number of appearances for every artist, still the Manics on top but a slightly different breakup overall:

The most popular song was Just Try by The Dandy Warhols. Oddly enough, this song only showed up on day 78, around halfway through but it took the trip by storm and became prime background for my days on the trail. Here is the list of the most popular tracks:

Humans get most of their information through vision but we have a remarkable ability to link memories to other information sources such as smells and sounds. From trail’s end on, many of those songs above will have the power to take me back to the hills and the highlands of the Continental Divide of North America.