Every year on my birthday I ask for Amazon gift cards so I can buy music and books. Help me out with some suggestions. Generally I love rock and alt rock. I made a list of a few songs which I never skip on my iPod so you could get an idea of the kind of music I like:
Black Horse and the Cherry Tree KT Tunstall
Hold back the river James Bay
Wanted Dead or Alive Bon Jovi
Simple Man Lynrd Skynrd
She Brings me Love Bad Company
Paint it Black Rolling Stones
Mumford & Sons – Winter Winds, Broken Crown, Roll away your stone
Styx – Renegade
Red Hot Chili Peppers
A couple of caveats:
I don’t like any high-pitched female voices. The kinds of female voices I like are close to Sophie B Hawkins, Traci Chapman, etc.
I generally prefer male voices (obviously from the list above)
I am a sucker for a good guitar riff, but I don’t like screaming death metal
Lyrics are super important. I NEED to sing along
So please suggest away! Youtube videos would be great so I can hear the song for myself, if you can find a link.
I assume you already know The White Stripes and The Black Keys. And I assume you already know all the old classic rock stuff like Jethro Tull, 70’s Aerosmith, Molly Hatchet, Allman Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, etc.
You seem to like southern or country-rock a bit. Try:
Drive-By Truckers
Turnpike Troubadours
Old 97s
Heartless Bastards
Trailer Bride
Lucinda Williams
Asylum Street Spankers
The Devil Makes Three
Shovels and Rope
Oh, and a criminally under-appreciated piano rock & roll group with influences such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Rolling Stones, Elton John, etc., (includes guest vocals from Big Pussy of “The Sopranos” fame!!):
I didn’t have time to try all of these tonight but I did like some already - more details tomorrow. i do love Cage the Elephant. The Temperance Movement has some amazing guitar bits. I Don’t Need No Doctor sounds good, too.
Please keep them coming! There are so many bands out there I’ve probably never heard of. I will probably have extensive time this weekend to sit and listen to all of them and pick the ones I like.
If I could make a suggestion…set up a Pandora account. Put all those songs in and set it to shuffle. For the next week or so, thumbs down the songs you don’t like and after a few days or a week it should come up with a pretty good idea of what you do like. See where that takes you.
Although, you may want to find at least one more semi-current song to put in the mix or I think it’s going to pick mostly classic rock (it might/probably even peg RCHP as classic rock at this point). I see you have KT Tunstell and Mumford and Sons. Maybe toss in Arcade Fire or Jack White/White Strips or something just to get some current stuff in to the mix since it seems like you aren’t only looking for stuff from the 70’s and 80’s.
You can also Thumbs Up songs you do like, not only to skew it towards those songs, but also because you can then log on to your account later and see what you gave a thumbs up to so you can see what you liked and buy/download those songs.
Not a bad idea! I will try! I have a Pandora account. First I am to going to put them all in a youtube playlist and listen to them all. When I know which songs I like and don’t like then I can go to Pandora.
