Over a winter I get out and do a lot of skiing. Last season I had something like 50 ski days, and this year I am still working on my count. One might say that I am a regular ski bum, but I can be due to the fact that A lot of the work that I do at the theatre is in the evening. It is really a great life!

A good portion of the days that I go skiing, I go by myself. NOt many of my friends have as flexible a schedule as I do. One of the things that keeps me going through the day is having a song in my head. Having a song keeps my skiing rhythm going, and I think it must help keep me focused. The crazy thing is that the songs that get stuck for a ski day are often the most random.

The other day I found myself singing “You’re the top” from Anything Goes!. I would be cruising through the powder singing out loud, but sure as anything I was making pretty turns. I also commonly find myself humming the soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean as I make my way down the mountain.

I know that I am not the only one who gets a tune stuck in their head while skiing. My uncle does the same, though his repertoire is slightly smaller. For him, the runs that are cruisers are “Santa Baby Runs.” Personally I don’t find “Santa Baby” to be a particularly great song for skiing, but when you ski a lot around the christmas season it can be catchy.

Generally I feel like I have my own personal soundtrack playing in my head most of the time. I like to actually listen to music too. When I get in the car I love to put on what I call “Epic Driving Music” which usually consists of soundtracks from epic movies. It is just fun.

What music defines the soundtrack of your activities? Do you have music or songs that get stuck in your head when you go running or to the gym or hiking or biking?

This post is probably long overdue and probably very overdone, but the idea has been nagging at me for months. It really all started over this past summer. I spend my summers working at Indian and Forest Acres camps. They are brother and sister camps in Maine, with kids ranging in age from 7-17. What struck me as odd was that almost every kid in camp knew all the lyrics to “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey.

How could this be? I wondered. I wasn’t even born yet when the song was released, and some of the kids at camp were born after Y2K (that still boggles my mind sometimes). I had totally forgotten that the pilot episode of Glee had aired just before camp started. Since then it has turned into a craze.

…and how late 2009 tries to kill the A Cappella genre of music.

So I finally have had the chance to start watching NBC’s new show, “The Sing Off” over the past couple nights. I probably wouldn’t have watched it except that my father called me up and told me that his company, VideoLink, shot all the Boston footage of the group from Tufts University, the Beelzebubs. I still have yet to watch the final episode, but it has kinda been a relative love-hate relationship between me and the show, and I am not sure that I would watch it again if they do another season.

Lets start with the fact that this is a show about singing and singing groups. Each episode is two hours long and each group only got maybe two minutes for each song (and they only did one song each in the first episode. You hear more music in an hour of American Idol (once you get through the first couple rounds) than in this show. These a cappella groups worked really hard and some travelled pretty far to get to the show and they are singing a maximum of four minutes each in a two hour show. That would be 32 minutes of singing in 120 minutes of show (if all eight groups performed two songs). What is up with that? We want to watch the show for the music, not the stories and the talking.