Musical Coincidences

Over 10 years ago, I had my first of a series of musical coincidences.  I was in the gym at work, and when I paused my iPod on a Tom Petty song, I was surprised to hear another Tom Petty song playing on the radio in the gym.  It was a classic rock station, so hearing Petty wasn't especially unusual (at the time, I found a site where Petty had 15-20 songs on a list of Top 1000 rock songs), but my iPod is almost always on shuffle across genres...and the possible Petty songs were about 10 out of perhaps 5,000 songs then.

The next level concurrence came when "Viva la Vida" by Coldplay was on my iPod in the car when I stopped at a rest area, only to hear "Viva la Vida" playing inside the rest area.  Not quite as big a coincidence in some sense since the song was a current hit on the radio and I'd been listening to the album.  Rare for me to be current, but there it was.

The ultimate one came though when a classic song, Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" was on the iPod, among 6,000 possible songs by then, when I hit pause to hear that same song coming out of the radio on SiriusXM, which happened to be on "80's on 8" of the 6 main stations I listen to!  That has not happened since and would not expect to again.

And while I've noticed many times having an appropriate song (say about running) matching my current activity, the most uncanny one happened this week.  I was on an airplane playing the 94% app on my iPad.  It's like "Family Feud" where you have to guess the top answers to a question.  I'd been stuck on one "Change of ______"  having guessed Clothes, Pace, Season,... but imagine my surprise as I correctly guessed "Heart" only to notice that at the same moment Cyndi Lauper's song "Change of Heart" was playing in my ear!!!

Cue the Twilight Zone music...