The Soundtrack of Your Life

This is an exercise in how well you understand yourself and your music. It’s designed to make you think about three main things: your life expectations, your belief in either chance or destiny and your sense of pride in your music collection. You will need: a sheet of paper, a pen, and a digital store of you entire music collection that you can play at random (i.e. iPod or Windows Media Player or equivalent).
Below are listed the main themes of the average story. I’ve simplified it to 13 tracks like your average decent album and included opening and closing tracks for soundtrack purposes. Firstly, read them, study them and understand them. Relate them to a few films and you’ll get the gist of them. You’ll find that most films follow this general formula, perhaps not including all elements, but most.

(0. Opening credits)
The character and context
The call to duty and issues of destiny
Familial pressures and discord
Romantic interlude
Preparation for the journey and departure
Encounter with a magic animal / wise old man / Comic relief
Changing fortunes and acts of judgment
Self-sacrifice and transformation
Single-mindedness and the determination to succeed
Unforeseen entrapment, chaos and despair
Unexpected hope and serendipity
Struggle with illusion and the final conflict
Ultimate decision, completion and culmination of events
(14. Closing credits)

Anyway, the next thing you do is to write 0 to 14 on your sheet of paper and begin writing in the songs that you want played as the soundtrack to each scene in the film of your life. You can do this in any of several ways: a) imagine your actual life story being filmed as a biopic; or b) imagining a complete fantasy version of your life; or c) viewing your life through various lenses (romantic, spiritual, political, musical etc.), or in whatever way you choose. Like everything else in life, the more effort you put into it, the more interesting it’ll be. Of course it may be tricky to assign songs to certain scenes but if you think less in terms of the mundanity of everyday life and more in terms of songs that evoke an emotional response in you and it should be easier.
When you are satisfied with your chosen soundtrack of your life, and have written them all down, you can move on to the interesting part of the exercise. Turn the sheet over, write out 0 to 14 again and open your complete music store. Put it on shuffle and press play. Whatever song comes on first is the opening credits song for the alternative soundtrack of your life. Continue in this way until you have a completely random version. Curse yourself for keeping shit music. Contemplate the significance of the random version. Wonder how shit your life might turn out. Compare and contrast with the other version. Bitch about me for wasting an hour of your life. End of exercise.