I am not Klaus Kinski (my wife chooses five songs to start our day).

I will give you five chances to find a song that will start today off on the right note,
I informed my wife.

She sat down in front of the digital music library I have been building for the last 15 years.

Careful, I cautioned.
This will affect the rest of the day, and it will be all your fault if you choose poorly.

One

Somberly she scrolled through, took a swag of coffee, clicked space bar, stood up, tossed her Valkyrie hair back, stood there, waiting for the first note. "I don't know," she murmured.

The unmistakeable guitar of Guns N' Roses Sweet Child ‘O Mine crashed through our entire top floor. She picked up her air guitar and began slashing along, I joined in with a cucumber microphone that was laying around.

Not bad,
I begrudgingly acknowledged.

Two

Arcade Fire's Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels). Becca looked up hesitantly.

"Bold move," I said. "This is one of the greatest songs ever invented, and it's barely eight in the morning."

One of the children came up. "Come play!"

A sweatdrop fell off my forehead and splashed in the child's face. "Can't play now,” I impatiently brushed her off, “…we're listening to a very important song. Never interrupt during this song."

Her shoulders slumped.

Three-Four-Five

I don’t remember everything that happened after that. There was some heavy squabbling about parents playing music too loud, and perhaps an adult who kept getting irritated that good songs were getting interrupted by loud voices coming from little people, and in general the morning soundtrack was alive with jungle squeaking and squawking from various creatures and occasionally supplemented by the next three tracks Becca chose; all of which, I had to begrudgingly acknowledge, were…

…pretty spot on. If I was trying to be a cool clever fellow, I might have written “…pretty Spotify on.” But I’m just me, so we will pretend I didn’t even think that.

Franz Ferdinand’s This Fire
The Beatles’ Across the Universe
Muse’s Time is Running Out

I do have to question her sequencing of these tracks, but I give moxy points for throwing in two tracks (#2, #4) that I usually place firmly in the late-afternoon to night acceptable time of day playlists. But somehow, she made them work, and that’s a good reminder that no matter how strongly you feel about something, sometime you gotta open the door to somebody else doing something crazy and different. Like playing Arcade Fire and the Beatles on a Sunday morning.

Shortly thereafter, we settled in to read some Doctor Seuss. Something about an elephant having surreal dreams about an imaginary colony of tiny beings or something.