Radios in motion.

I was out for my after-dinner walk tonight and a big black SUV pulled into a driveway not too far from where I was walking.

It had its windows open and the driver was treating the neighborhood to his/her evening jam of choice. I would have expected crappy modern country from a vehicle like that …

… but no, the evening broadcast was Al Green’s “Belle.”

Hadn’t heard that in years and it was a wonderful unexpected change of pace. (That whole album is a gentle pleasure, as I recall it, and now I’m gonna have to take it out again. Feels like summer!)

There might, in fact, be hope for the world.

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In other news, I have achieved a milestone and now I’m laying down my burden.

At 11:47 p.m. this past Monday, low-powered, municipally owned radio station WBCA in Boston played “Salty Dame” from Watts, the Bandcamp album I did a few years ago with my drummer friend Mark.

This marked the 100th time since October 8, 2020, that WBCA’s automated music programming computer has played a song from Watts.

Now, there is no automated way that I know of to check for radio play. The only method I know is to go to a website called Spinitron, which collects radio stations’ playlists, and do a daily search. I have to do this daily because the search is only free for the preceding 24 hours. If I skip a day, I’ll miss a day’s worth of airplay results. (Or I’d have to buy a subscription, which I don’t want to do.)

So every day for the past 896 days I have gone to Spinitron and fed my name into the search box, to see whether any of the three songs I submitted from Watts got played in the previous 24 hours. And when one of them has, I’ve tracked it on a spreadsheet, recording the date, time, song title, and title of the programming block in which it appeared.

(Have I missed a day here or there? Maybe, here or there. But very, very few.)

I don’t know what’s kept me on this track for so long, but this feels like a good place to step off of it.

I am curious, having come this far, as to whether WBCA ever weeds out its music library. Will the songs from Watts disappear entirely at some future point? Or will they simply turn up in the automated playlists less and less frequently as other people submit their music and the library gets bigger and bigger?

I probably won’t hang around and find out.

Probably.

(It would be stylish to somehow convert all this data into some kind of auto-generated noise/music and make that my next Bandcamp release. Maybe that should be a project. Use the materials available to you…)

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Real soon now, we’ll see the start of what will likely be Joe Castiglione’s last season in the Red Sox broadcast booth. I haven’t been paying attention to preseason ball — haven’t in years — but I’ll have to lock that into my daily routine once the regular season starts.

Life has been in kind of a nice quiet lull lately, outside of storms, but that will change soon enough.