I think that it was only really this year - or maybe '04 at the very earliest - that I admitted that working with music on is distracting. If I really want and need to think hard about something - which was rarely the case until the final stages of my uni career - then silence is the way to go, the exception being when I'm really pushed (say, on the night before a paper is due) and need some kind of background stimulation to prevent me from just subsiding into total inactivity and/or falling asleep. Since it's been all about writing and, consequently, actual thinking this year (as opposed to the largely automatic grind of studying for law exams), and because I've been taking arts seriously, this has meant that a fair amount of my working time has been sans music.
Still, in this twilight period of ten days (post-Thesis/literature papers but pre-final philo paper), I've found myself mostly writing/thinking with music on, and doing so reasonably productively, which I think is attributable to my having gotten into the right sort of zone for absorbing and thinking about philosophy over the last, say, month or so (though it's really probably been cumulative over the course of this whole year, and particularly the last semester). It's strange how one's mind shifts into different configurations over time, according to the influences to which it's (ahem) subject - although I guess that the strangeness inheres more in those shifts and resultant configurations not being directly accessible but rather only becoming apparent in their 'outputs' (as thoughts, ideas, conversational modes, etc), than in the idea of the shifting itself.
So anyway, mostly this background music has involved:
- Year of Meteors
- Humming By The Flowered Vine ("What You Said" is my favourite at the moment)
- Wilco (mostly A Ghost Is Born and the first disc of Being There)
- Eva Cassidy (uh-oh, adult contemporary beckons)
- Cat Power's rather stunning newie, "The Greatest" (is Matador the best label in the world these days?)
